What is "irretrievably"

Usage examples of "irretrievably".

In crossing one river one of the horses was so irretrievably stuck in a quicksand that humanity required it to be shot, and at the next, the Umkamas, the stream was so swollen that the Captain had to devise a canoe by sewing two cowskins together with sinews and stretching it upon branches, in which, as no one save himself had any notion of boating, he shoved off alone.

Clothes were my own chief care, for, freely as I had purged it at Flensburg, my wardrobe was still very unsuitable, and I had already irretrievably damaged two faultless pairs of white flannels.

By this time in the old life you had sunk irretrievably into madness, broken in both body and mind, Meridion thought, watching the way the currents of air within his glass globe observatory made the image look as if Gwydion were running even now, caught forever in jubilant motion.

After the Treaty of Tilsit and the bonds of friendship which seemed likely to produce a permanent union between the Emperors of France and Russia, the cause of the Bourbons must have been considered irretrievably lost.

For we need but point to the doctrines of so many sects that degrade the Creator to the rank, and assign to Him the passions of humanity, to prove that now, as always, the old truths must be committed to a few, or they will be overlaid with fiction and error, and irretrievably lost.

I can only explain it by remembering the unworldliness of our lives at Beechwood, the heavy cares which now pressed upon us from without, and the notable fact--which our own family experience ought to have taught us, yet did not--that in cases like this, often those whom one would have expected to be most quick-sighted, are the most strangely, irretrievably, mournfully blind.

Temple, at Mamhead, in Devonshire, and not having returned to town till the second of May, I did not see Dr. Johnson for a considerable time, and during the remaining part of my stay in London, kept very imperfect notes of his conversation, which had I according to my usual custom written out at large soon after the time, much might have been preserved, which is now irretrievably lost.

Everything was lost now, utterly and irretrievably - lost as a dozen other fine emprises had been by his sudden and ungoverned frenzy.

To work within different epistemologies is not to concede that the world is irretrievably fractured, merely that, in our present state of understanding, it is the best that we can do.

Understanding and functioning in these worlds, it seems, demands radically different epistemologies from the controlled reductionism of the lab. Am I then an irretrievably fractured person, entering and re-entering these different worlds of meaning?

Every deserted street was eloquent of darling projects desperately resigned, of valued labours miserably deserted, of delighting enjoyments irretrievably lost.

Poole could not help wondering if, among all the exabytes that were irretrievably lost, were the records of his own children: even now, his descendants of the thirtieth generation might be walking the Earth.

It goes back to what was said on pages 131-133, about the possibility of there being portions of the universe that may irretrievably be lost.

Whatever part of Roy Batty, the human original, had been imbedded in the briefcase was gone now, dispersed to atoms as cold and fine as the white powder scattered irretrievably from the empty Sebastian packet.

I was despatched accordingly, in the troopship Orontes, and landed a month later on Portsmouth jetty, with my health irretrievably ruined, but with permission from a paternal government to spend the next nine months in attempting to improve it.