English

Alternative forms

• murder one's darlings

Verb

kill one's darlings

1. (idiomatic) To destroy, especially with conflicted motives, things or persons of which one is fond.
   • 2008 Jan. 20, Virginia Heffernan, "Art in the Age of Franchising," New York Times (retrieved 16 April 2015):

     [Fans] won’t participate in online dialogues and events, visit message boards and chat rooms or design games. As a result, platforms for supplementary advertising aren’t built, starving even the shows fans profess to love . . . . Aloof and passive fans kill their darlings.

   • 2011 Jan. 30, Theodore Bale, "Choreographer Koresh debuts Sense of Human," Houston Chronicle (retrieved 16 April 2015):

     In sharp contrast to choreographers who try to build a repertory that reflects an ongoing personal style, Koresh prefers to "kill his darlings," as he puts it, and start from scratch.

   • 2015 March 28, Ted Loos, "The Whitney Museum’s New Home," Wall Street Journal (retrieved 16 April 2015):

     As the curators sifted through more than 100 years of artworks, disagreements inevitably arose. “We all had to kill our darlings,” says Foster.