"Blur" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wondering regret.. quietly he passed the missive to Theos, who took it from his hand with a tremor of something like fear. The delicately traced characters with which it was covered floated for a moment in a faint blur before his eyes,—then they resolved themselves into legible shape and meaning, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... reasons of race and religion against it. But she need not have feared that Pontiac would show himself, or his long and savage mourning for the destruction of the red man, to any descendant of the English. As the bushes closed behind her she looked back: the phosphoric blur was already so far in the west that she could hardly be sure she saw it again. And the young agent of the Fur Company, breaking his way among leaves, met her with both hands; saying gayly, to save her the shock of ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... My breath stopped. On our mirror I saw the stranger's hood part just a little. There seemed to be no face; just the blur of something brownish. ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... who bound me to him as no other man has since bound me, were too dear to leave even briefly without wrenching pain. I dreamed nightly of robbers and disaster, of being ignominiously thrust out of Mittau, of seeing a woman whose face was a blur and who moved backward from me when I called her my sister; of troops marching across and trampling me into the earth as straw. I groaned in spirit. Yet to Mittau I was spurred by the kind of force that seems to press from unseen distances, ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... all trace of the sleigh, and at last Rallywood himself, well as he knew the country, became bewildered; but luckily the horse he rode was a charger he had had with him on the Frontier. He left it to choose its own direction, yet it was long before a blur of light which he knew to be the open doorway of the block-house grew out ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... seemed to carry me with him. We drank each a glass of vermouth before dinner sitting over a scented fire of deodar branches, while outside the little window in front of me the lifted lines of the great empty Himalayan landscape faded and fell into a blur. I remembered the solitary scarlet dahlia that stood between us and the vast cold hills and held its colour when all was grey but that. The hill world waited for the winter; down a far valley we could hear a barking deer. Armour talked slowly, often hesitating for a word, of ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... into the Preparation room and sat at his desk with his brows on his hand and his eyes on his book. The print danced before his gaze: letter rushed into letter, word merged mistily into word, line into line, till all was a grey blur. A blink of the eyes—an effort of the will—a sort of "squad, shun!" to the type before him—and the words jumped back into their places, letters separated from their entanglement and stood like soldiers at spruce attention. A relaxing of the effort—and dismiss! helter-skelter, pell-mell ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... of the living, the shrieks of the dying deafened him. Renewed shots from the rifles in the tree, made the Serpent lash about in a dazzling white blur, smashing trees, apes, everything in its path. But Kirby, finding himself still safe, scarcely heard or saw. His eyes, turned upward, saw ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... continued stubbornly dark, and by the time Sally gave up trying to determine precisely which window it had been, and turned her gaze seaward again, the boat had vanished. Its lights, at least, were no longer visible, and it was many minutes before the girl succeeded in locating the blur it made on the face of the waters. It seemed to be moving, but the distance was so great that she could not be sure ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... manners; it gives to morals a tincture of devotion; and, as with the spell of magic, such as Milton describes in "Comus," it dissipates with a glance the wild rout of low desires and insane follies which so much blur and blot up the otherwise fair face of human society. It permits of no meanness in its train; it expels vulgarity, and, with a high stretch toward perfected humanity, it unearths the grovelling nature, and gives it aspirations of sand ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... men like you!" he exclaimed, standing before a small, exquisitely finished Madonna. "What do these Milanese know of art? Or the Florentines, for that matter? Your 'Last Supper'—I saw it last week. It is a blur. Would that the sainted Louis might have taken it bodily, stone by stone, to our France, as he longed to do. You will see; the mere copy has more honor with us than the original here. Come with us," he added persuasively, laying his hand on ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... their passion. Whenever she stopped thinking about that for a moment she felt as she sometimes did after lying on the grass and staring up too long at the sky; her eyes were so full of light that everything about her was a blur. ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... dark patch—the hand of one who, ghostly, silent, was creeping down into the hallway—vanished and reappeared on a level with my eyes. Then a vague shape became visible; no more than a blur upon the dim design of the wall-paper... and Nayland Smith got his ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... bloom of dark they softly stir, Till arrowy dawn the shadow-blur Dispels—God's tingling kiss of morning On oak and maple and pine ...
— Song-waves • Theodore H. Rand
... below. It made Tarzan sick and dizzy to look down upon it from so great a height, so he closed his eyes tight and held his breath. Higher and higher climbed the huge bird. Tarzan opened his eyes. The jungle was so far away that he could see only a dim, green blur below him, but just above and quite close was the sun. Tarzan reached out his hands and warmed them, for they were very cold. Then a sudden madness seized him. Where was the bird taking him? Was he to submit thus passively ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... crystal summit ridges delighted us as did the changing waters in the path of the steamer. Following immediately upon the transparency preserved to a depth of some eighty feet, a blur passed over the surface. This changed by imperceptible degrees to a light green. The green, again, speedily deepened, shading into a light blue; and finally, in deepest water (where the Lake is all but fathomless), the color becomes so densely blue that we could not believe ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... and inheritance, consecrated in her right by the awful seal of the great High-Priest Death—before whose inviolable silence questions cease, and the scroll of the closed life is no longer searched, save with eyes that blur the lines ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... by Wilson in an extraordinary joint session of Congress, held on the 2d of April. In this, possibly his greatest speech, he was careful not to blur the idealistic principles which, since the spring of 1916, he had been formulating. War existed because Germany by its actions had thrust upon the United States the status of belligerent. But the ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... are indignant that the satirist should have made this the climax to his praise of a woman. And yet, we fear, he saw only too truly. What unexpected failures have we seen, literally, in this respect! How often did the Martha blur the Mary out of the face of a lovely woman at the sound of a crash amid glass and porcelain! What sad littleness in all the department thus represented! Obtrusion of the mop and duster on the tranquil meditation of a husband and ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... hardly lighted before they were startled by a confused sound of shouting from the compound;—a blur of shrill and deep voices, punctuated by the strained discordant bark of a dog;—a bark unmistakable to ears that have heard it once. Desmond sprang out of ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... coughed. He glanced from the distant door, now a mere blur in the obscurity, to his companion's face and back again to the door—of which he seemed reluctant to lose sight. For a moment he seemed at a loss how to proceed. When he did speak, after a long pause, it was in a dry curt tone. "It is about him I wish to hear something," he said. "I ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... she felt that more complicated things were moving rapidly inside her head than ever before—as though she had tried to keep track of the revolutions of a wheel and had lost her count and could now only stare stupidly at the spokes, whirling till they blended into one blur. What was this Endbury life she had come back to? What in the world had that man been talking about? What a strange person he was! How very bright his eyes were when he looked at you—as though he were, somehow, seeing you more than most people did. What did the doctor mean by all that about ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... verse, makes him the type of the poet and has added a new problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur: he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass, the tragic and the comic indifferently and without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute details, to a hair point, finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain; ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... blue flashes in a desperate effort to know what was happening to the crippled liner, but no message came back. The last word from the Titanic was that she was sinking. Then the sparking became fainter. The call was dying to nothing. The Virginian's operator labored over a blur of signals. It was hopeless. So the Allan ship strove on, fearing that the worst ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... snowstorm was blowing furiously, straight up the St Lawrence, making Quebec a partly seen blur to the nearest American patrols and the Heights of Abraham a wild sea of whirling drifts to the nearest British sentries. One o'clock passed, and nothing stirred. But when two o'clock struck at Holland House Montgomery rose and began ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... Unfortunately, that's about all we're likely to deduce from them, and I doubt if a finger-print expert will be able to help us. Observe, there are no finger-prints—merely faint marks of the middle of the fingers, and a kind of blur for the thumb. But the thing is ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... from the doctor, but it began to blur out before Hanson could understand it. He fought to remember what he'd heard the nurse say—something about when he was alive—as if he'd been dead a long time.... He couldn't hold the thought. At a final rapid motion of the girl's hand his eyes closed, the smell faded from his ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... murmured. She lay and pressed her palms to her eyeballs, so firmly that when she removed them, the room was a blur. Maurice, standing at the window, beat a tattoo on the pane. Then, with his back to her, he began to speak. He blamed himself for what he called the folly of the past weeks. "I gave way when I should have been firm. And ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... of gold. Whowever the Dutch concluded that they would have no mo Admirals that ware gentlemen (for Obdam was so) because they never fought fortunatly with their ennemies when they had such. But certainly this is nought but a fiction made by a commonwealth to cast a blur upon nobility, seing thir same very states have fought most couragiously and advantagiously under the conduct of ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... glance, and before long he was incapable of seeing anything saving the flash of the disk, the blur of the alternate colors as they spun together. He paid no heed to the path of the sunlight as it stretched along the floor under the window and told of a westering sun. The first Terry knew of it he was standing in a warm pool of gold, but he gave the sun at his feet ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... the great fire on shore, by which the defeated pirates lay carousing in the swamp. The other, a mere blur of light upon the darkness, indicated the position of the anchored ship. She had swung round to the ebb—her bow was now towards me—the only lights on board were in the cabin, and what I saw was merely a reflection on the fog of the strong ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the engine awoke to life and the propeller spun around, a blur of indistinctness. The motor was working sweetly. Toni throttled down, assured himself that everything was working well, and then, with a wave of his hand toward Jack, began to taxi across the field, to head up ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... confused now, and blended into an interesting background, whose elements I can no longer separate. Your pardon, my lady, but I have forgotten, forgotten so completely that even the stairs seem merely a gentle blur." ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... so clear. It needs no art, With faint, averted feet And many a tear, In our opposed paths to persevere. Go thou to East, I West. We will not say There's any hope, it is so far away. But, O, my Best, When the one darling of our widowhead, The nursling Grief, Is dead, And no dews blur our eyes To see the peach-bloom come in evening skies, Perchance we may, Where now this night is day, And even through faith of still averted feet, Making full circle of our banishment, Amazed meet; The bitter journey to the bourne so ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... hills, I forgive, I forget Life's hoard of regret— All the terror and pain of a chafing chain. Grind on, O cities, grind! I leave you a blur behind. I am lifted elate—the skies expand; Here the world's heaped gold is a pile of sand. Let them weary and work in their narrow walls; I ride with the voices of waterfalls. I swing on as one in a dream—I swing. Down the very hollows, I shout, I sing. The world is gone like an ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... and looked back. The little brown horse and the little brown girl were one with the little brown station so far away, and presently the saloon and men were blotted out in one blur of green and brown ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... doubtful if he saw her depart, for the entire room was merely an indistinct blur. He was too desperately angry even to swear. In this emergency, Mr. Wynkoop, dimly realizing that something unpleasant had occurred, sought to attract the attention of his ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... a view that was fairy-like. Spread out in the distance were the sparkling lights of Paris. He was divided from them by the vast mass of roofs about him, by a gulf of empty space, and beyond, by a dark blur—the two arms of the Seine flowing on either side of the Palais de Justice.... The mysterious darkness! The fascination of the sparkling points of light!... Fandor gave himself a mental shake.... This was no moment for dreaming ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... opening scene of my story commences. The sun was setting leisurely behind the western mountains in a mass of lurid clouds, and drowsy twilight had already begun to blur the fine scenery in the east, when Widow White sat down to her evening repast. A fire of hickory reflected a ruddy glare upon the hearth, before which reclined innocent pussy, with eyes half-closed, gazing intently at the flames as they crept slowly around the logs, and uniting, darted suddenly ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... there was a long pause—a pause that was somehow akin to the flicker of the fire, the quiver of the reading-lamp upon their hands, the white blur from the window; a pause of shifting and ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... paternoster, return to his sheep, turn the sows into the hay, beat the dog before the lion, put the cart before the horse, scratch where he did not itch, shoe the grasshopper, tickle himself to make himself laugh, know flies in milk, scrape paper, blur parchment, then run away, pull at the kid's leather, reckon without his host, beat the bushes without catching the birds, and thought that bladders were lanterns. He always looked a gift-horse in the mouth, hoped to ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... presently to feel quite windy: presently it blew so strong, that he could hardly keep his legs. But, he got to an arched window in the tower, breast high, and holding tight, looked down upon the house-tops, on the smoking chimneys, on the blur and blotch of lights (towards the place where Meg was wondering where he was and calling to him perhaps), all kneaded up together in a leaven of mist ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... view as he stood before the basin at the rear of the car, for even now they were passing over Turin. It was a blur of light, vivid and beautiful, that shone beneath him in the midst of this gulf of darkness, sweeping away southwards into the gloom as the car sped on towards the Alps. How little, he thought, seemed this great ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... settled round her heart; her eyes fixed themselves on the skylight, as though beseeching it to break and let in sound. A cat, making a pilgrimage from roof to roof, the four dark moving spots of its paws, the faint blur of its body, was all she saw. And suddenly, unable to bear it any longer, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the wooden building, and his niece standing a moment on the veranda watched the long train roll away down the faint blur of track that ran west to the farthest verge of the great white wilderness. Then with a little impatient gesture ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... and then at Thompson, and his face fell. Thompson, watching him as a man watches his antagonist, saw Tommy's lips tremble, a suspicious blur creep into his eyes. Even in his anger ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... The day had been a blur! Well, probably all the rest of life would be a blur. Anyway, one could still dine, and he recollected that the puree of tomatoes at last night's dinner had been rather to his liking. He seated himself deliberately at the board, congratulating himself ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... his relatively few neighbors being placed near the center. According to this view, the galactic belt was an effect of perspective; for when looking in the direction of the plane of the disk, the eye ranged through an immense extension of stars which blended into a glimmering blur, surrounding us like a ring; while when looking out from the sides of the disk we saw but few stars, and in those directions the heavens appeared relatively blank. Finally it was recognized that ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... convinced them that the two would not be in the way. A clatter of steel against steel presently followed, the windlass whined and rattled, and Elsa saw the anchor rise slowly from the deeps, bringing up a blur of muddy water; and blobs of pale clay dripped from the anchor-flukes. A moment after she felt the old familiar throb under her feet, and the ship moved slowly out ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... then hesitated, for she felt the color coming into her face, while a strange blur confused every object in the room. "I'm very, very sorry," she added, hastily, after a moment. "I ought not to have come. I'm not equal to this. It wouldn't take you very long to drive home with me, and then you could ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... nearer the earth. The day was dark and foggy, and at first the lads could discern nothing below but a great blur. ...
— The Boy Allies with the Cossacks - Or, A Wild Dash over the Carpathians • Clair W. Hayes
... are hissing at the backs of the besieged. Another minute and Burleigh topples over on the sward, the life blood pouring from his side, and Loring sees that half his fighting force is gone, even as everything begins to swim before his eyes, and the hand that strives to sweep away the blur before his sight, leaves his pallid face smeared with blood. There is a sound of coming thunder in his ears, the blare of distant trumpet, the warning yell of wary Indians, the rousing cheer of charging horse, and the earth seems turning round and rolling up to meet ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... sins of impurity, and her understanding of such could scarcely have been expressed save in the general language of her prayers. Guarded jealously at every moment of her life, the world had made no blur on the fair tablet of her mind; her Eden had suffered no invasion. She could only repeat to herself that her heart had gone dreadfully astray in its fondness, and that, whatsoever it cost her, the old hopes, the strength of which was only now proved, must be utterly uprooted. ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... gone by since, on that chill November evening, the news of Lord Ingleby's death had reached Shenstone. The happenings of the weeks which followed, now seemed vague and dreamlike to Myra, just a few events standing out clearly from the dim blur of misery. She remembered the reliable strength of the doctor; the unselfish devotion of Margaret O'Mara; the unspeakable comfort of Jane's wholesome understanding tenderness. Then the dreaded arrival of her mother; followed, immediately, according to promise, by the ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... as if they had been given into my hands. There was a bit of a haze, and you could not see more than a few hundred yards. I hired a boat for myself, and I pulled after them. I could see the blur of their craft, but they were going nearly as fast as I, and they must have been a long mile from the shore before I caught them up. The haze was like a curtain all round us, and there were we three in the middle of it. My God, shall I ever forget their faces when they saw who was ...
— The Adventure of the Cardboard Box • Arthur Conan Doyle
... stepped back into the shed, covering the child up so that the drifting wet should not beat upon it. He came after me and kissed it again, saying 'Good- night, poor little innocent, good-night!' three or four times. Then he went off quickly and sprang into his saddle and in the blur of rain I saw horse and man turn away. He waved his hand once and his handsome pale face gleamed upon me like that of a ghost in the storm. 'Till to-morrow!' he called, and was gone. I took the child into the house and called Priscilla. She was always a rough ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... $500 or $1,000 every month, until they were perfectly sickened. One by one they shut up shop. One went to his farm, another to his merchandise, another to emigrant running, another (known by the elegant surname of Blur-eye Thompson) to raising recruits, several into the bounty ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... red blur before the eyes of the Belgian. No! The man should not have her. She was for him and him alone. He would not be robbed ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... world washed cool and miraculously clean by the soft breath of the hills. Steadily he had jogged across the desert toward the range. Afternoon had brought him to the foothills, where a fine rain blotted out the peaks and softened the sharp outlines of the landscape to a gentle blur of ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... held up by distant acquaintances and even by persons hardly known to me by sight, who congratulated me on the Emperor's public championing of me against my powerful Sabine neighbors, I felt my strength ebbing and sometimes saw a gray blur between my eyes and what ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... fishing-net, in the meshes of which two crawfish and a roach with glistening scales were entangled. The women appeared to have cause of dispute between themselves—to be rating one another about something. In the background, and to one side of the house, showed a faint, dusky blur of pinewood, and even the weather was in keeping with the surroundings, since the day was neither clear nor dull, but of the grey tint which may be noted in uniforms of garrison soldiers which have seen long service. To complete the ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... beneath us lay the dark rich hedgy flats and the copse-chequered slopes, white with the blossom of apples. At widely opposite points of the expanse two great towers of cathedrals rose sharply out of a reddish blur of habitation, ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... "Biggest of Them All." But Cynthia's ideal bore little likeness to the actual Sandy, and her letters had become but the outpourings of a heart that must create its own Paradise or perish. Sandy Morley had faded into an indistinct blur, but the romance he had awakened bore the girl far and away from the common life ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... with shadows of many patterns,—circular, heart-shaped, spear-shaped, netted, and barred. There were other shadows that were no more than ghosts of shadows, cast by faint, diaphanous films of scum which scarcely achieved to blur the clear downpour of radiance, but were nevertheless perceived and appreciated by many of the delicate larval creatures which made a large part of the ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... be swarming with glittering pink-winged thoughts all singing. He walked on air, holding tightly to the hand of his goddess, seeing nothing but a blur of green and sunshine. Then a clean-cut idea stabbed him like a stiletto: was this Vanessa or Iole? And, to his own astonishment, he ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... believe to be the ordinary waking experience of one who is both deaf and blind. They think that I can know very little about objects even a few feet beyond the reach of my arms. Everything outside of myself, according to them, is a hazy blur. Trees, mountains, cities, the ocean, even the house I live in are but fairy fabrications, misty unrealities. Therefore it is assumed that my dreams should have peculiar interest for the man of science. In some undefined way it is expected ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... desperate and quite futile effort to assure him that she was nothing of the sort. But she knew that no more than a blur of sound came from her lips, and even while she strove to make herself intelligible the floating world became a dream, and darkness fell ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... tail protruded to betray him. There he lay down with one paw over his nose, and sank into the long sleep. For an hour the frost bit hard upon the fields, stiffening to stone the bodies but now so hot with eager life. Then the snow came thick and silent, filling the emptiness with a moving blur, and buried away ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... was a queer thing; for ordinarily the swamp boy seemed to be as cool and self-possessed as an Indian brave, who thought it a blur on his manhood to display emotion in ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... a darker speck had started out of the medley of grey tones. In a moment it had doubled its size—had become a blur—then a shape. And at length, out of the leaden wrack, there emerged a small schooner, with tall, raking ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of his junior year in high school Carl grew more discontented. He let the lines of his Cicero fade into a gray blur that confounded Cicero's blatant virtue and Cataline's treachery, while he pictured himself tramping with snow-shoes and a mackinaw coat into the snowy solemnities of the northern Minnesota tamarack swamps. Much of his discontent was caused by his learned preceptors. The teachers for this ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... I gasped, in agony that my pain had been for nothing. Now all was lost. Then the blur lifted, and my amazed eyes beheld not ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... Ted, I can't see anything but just a solid blur," remarked another of the occupants of the boat; and Max knew that it was Shack Beggs, whose father was an engineer in one of the works at Carson, ...
— The Strange Cabin on Catamount Island • Lawrence J. Leslie
... arising from the stack which instantly disappeared. In the opposite direction there was a wide expanse of water, quiet as a mill-pond in spite of a fresh breeze, revealing in the distance the faint blue blur of a far-off coast line. Nothing broke the vista except the white sails of two sloops, evidently fishing boats, far off on the horizon. It was an ideal spot in which to lie—to quietly hide in during the hours ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... a blood-red, wrathful streak Pierce through the twilight glooms that blur His cruel vigilance and her Regard, they light fierce looks that wreak A hopeless hate that cannot stir, A ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... the house, walking with bowed head out of Sequoia, up the abandoned and decaying skid-road through the second-growth redwoods to the dark green blur that marked the old timber. It was May, and Nature was renewing herself, for spring comes late in Humboldt County. From an alder thicket a pompous cock grouse boomed intermittently; the valley quail, in pairs, were busy about their household ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... wandering forms began to slide into strait layers, and soft settlement of vapor. Loops of hanging moisture marked the hollows of the land-front, or the alleys of the waning light; and then the mass abandoned outline, fused its shades to pulp, and melted into one great blur of rain. Janetta thought of her Sunday frock, forgot the boat, and sped away ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... fancy-work, too long at a time, or if your eyes need glasses to make them see clearly, and you haven't them on, this little muscle becomes tired. Then the print of your book, or your writing, or the stitches you have taken begin to blur before your eyes. Your eyes begin to feel tired, and your head begins to ache. This is what we ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson
... drifts of cloud Sail slowly northward in the soft-hued sky, With blur half-tints and rolling summits bright, By the late sun caressed; slight hazes shroud All things afar; shineth each leaf anigh With its own warmth ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... Everychild. He could just see her now: a mere blur in the shadows far ahead of him. He could no longer hear the sound of her feet. Then quite suddenly ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... bolts. They stuck. Shouts came from the front entryway. He wrenched viciously at the fastenings. They gave now. The windows flew open. He glanced over his shoulder. A man, Mittel presumably, since he was the only one not in uniform, was springing into the room. There was a blur of forms and brass buttons behind Mittel—and Jimmie Dale leaped to the lawn, speeding across it ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... safely out at sea in the Channel, with fifty-four ships, when he sighted a dim blur toward the west. This was the Great Invincible Armada. Rain killed the wind, and the English lay under bare poles, unseen by the Spaniards, who still left some of their idle sails swinging to and fro. The great day had come at last. Philip's Armada had drunk to ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... tortuous windings of the coast, we could shorten our passage by very many miles. Hereupon we shaped our course accordingly and, the wind freshening somewhat, by afternoon the high coast had faded to a faint blur of distant mountain peaks, and by sunset ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... Department. It was merely a flat platform, ten feet wide by forty feet long, with a steel cab mounted on its forward end, through the windows of which one could see a young engineer in tweeds standing against a blur of ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... we're wanting to hear, Is what the plain facts of your christening were, For your name, just to hear it, Repeat it and cheer it, s'tang to the spirit As salt as a tear. And seeing you fly and the boys marching by, There's a shout in the throat and a blur in the eye And an aching to live for you always or die; And so, by our love for you floating above, And the scars of all wars and the sorrows thereof, Who gave you ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... camera there is a flattened glass ball called the lens. If you were to remove it, the camera would not take any pictures; it would take a blur of light and shade ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... of praise and blame That blur with mist his lustrous name, His thunderous laughter went and came, And lives and flies; The roar that follows on the ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of vast relief came over the girl as she recognized the caressing voice of the man from Wild-cat Hill. Instantly the figure on her left faded; the blur of it became one with the shadows of ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... now with a speed which made the flying rocks and foliage along the shore a blur—racing toward a white stretch of churning spray and foam that reached as far down the river as it was possible to see. From the water which dashed itself to whiteness against the rocks there still came the mighty boom! boom! which had put fear into ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... it. So I have not defined the outlines; I have suffused them with a haze of half-tints warm or golden, in such a sort that you can not lay your finger on the exact spot where background and contours meet. Seen from near, the picture looks a blur; it seems to lack definition; but step back two paces, and the whole thing becomes clear, distinct, and solid; the body stands out; the rounded form comes into relief; you feel that the air plays round it. And yet—I am not ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... his calendar to count the nights until the next meeting. Ever since he had left home, he had longed with a longing that was like hunger for the companionship of young people such as he had known at home. There was a blur over one of the dates, the little square that marked the twenty-fifth of December. It was a red-letter day on the calendar, but in Alec's bare little room a holiday that dragged its dismal length out toward ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... he raced down the lane, this time at so fast a clip that the faces of the spectators who lined the course were a mere blur in his eyes. ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in New Mexico • Frank Gee Patchin
... face value of the prize will be forwarded promptly by express, check on New York, or in any other way the recipient may direct. He is also told to antedate the letter, the intermediary promising to blur the postmark to correspond, so that the remittance may appear to have been made prior to the drawing. In conclusion the writer adroitly suggests that he desires the fortunate man to exhibit the money to his neighbors, stating how he obtained it, and mentioning particularly the address of the ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... which blur the sharpness of this distinction in practice. To begin with, many instincts mature gradually, and while they are immature an animal may act in a fumbling manner which is very difficult to distinguish from learning. James ("Psychology," ii, 407) maintains that children walk ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... Mathilde Wesendonck in his arms was Tristan in the arms of Isolde, he did not find a melody instead of a kiss on his lips; he did not find a progression of harmonies melting through the contours of a warm beauty with a blur of desperate ecstasies, semitones of desire, he found only the anxious happiness of any other lover. Nevertheless, he was gathering the substance of the second act of Tristan und Isolde. And it is this that Plato means when he says that ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... local aspect than it was intended afterwards to wear; yet that, for the sake of its subsequent universal value, the destruction of that local complexion was indispensable; that the corruptions inseparable from viva voce communication and imperfect education were the means adopted by the Creator to blur the details of the ideal, and give it that breadth which could not be otherwise obtainable—and that thus the value of the ideal was indefinitely enhanced, and DESIGNEDLY ENHANCED, alike by the waste of time and ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... for Caroline said she could not Dine comfortably in daylight. The pale flames were repeated in The mahogany of the table; the tall candlesticks, the silver appointments, were reflected also in a blur, like a grey mist; the furniture against the walls became merged into the shadows and Susan, hovering there, was no ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... foaming like a furious, rapid stream away from the stern. The houses and trees on the shore seemed to run into each other, and slide out of sight almost before the eye could rest upon them. The water alongside was merely a blue-green blur. Nitocris involuntarily held her breath as though she had been ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... we can make some headway. I believe the V-shape is the lower end of the mountain, probably a headland, and the arrow points to a place 30 leagues to the,—see here, in the last line is a W. and there is a blur before it and after it. That may be ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... been asleep they did not know, as the ghost-stories have it, but both were suddenly awakened by a commotion outside. It was intensely dark inside the tent, but as the two sat up they noticed a faint moving blur of light, which made itself just ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... the house—a nearer reach where there was a mass of rough water, and a certain tongue of shingle thrust out from the further bank. For days and weeks these river marks had warned the anxious inquirers that they might not expect sport. The diminution of the tongue of land on the one side, and a blur in the pure white of the foam on the other, told ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... along her finger, and strained my eyes to see. All I could make out was a dim greyish mist, with something like a little spot or blur on it, at the place which the maid's finger indicated as the position occupied by ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... an eminence above the town, solitary and aloof like a monastery, and nestling deep in its garden of lemon-trees, it commands a wide prospect of sea and sky. By day, the Pacific is a vast stretch of blue, flat like a floor, with a blur of distant islands on the horizon—chief among them Muloa, with its single volcanic cone tapering off into the sky. At night, this smithy of Vulcan becomes a glow of red, throbbing faintly against the darkness, a capricious ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... christening were,— For your name—just to hear it, Repeat it, and cheer it, 's a tang to the spirit As salt as a tear;— And seeing you fly, and the boys marching by, There's a shout in the throat and a blur in the eye, And an aching to live for you always—or die, If, dying, we still keep you waving on high And so, by our love For you, floating above, And the scars of all wars and the sorrows thereof, Who gave you the name of Old Glory, ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... golden dust in my eyes, and I am seeing things all wrong. We have anchored for the night.... I am watching the misty green blur, which is all that is left to me of India, grow more and more indistinct as darkness falls. Soon it will ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... wasn't sure. She had the impression that Kregg's fist connected squarely with the short man's chin before he dodged to one side in a movement so fast it was a blur. But that couldn't have been, because the short man wasn't moved by that blow that would have felled a steer, and Kregg roared in pain, grabbing ...
— The Jupiter Weapon • Charles Louis Fontenay
... and mingled with her blood the warm undercurrent of a dream. The dream had come to her many springs ago; and as Flossie grew plumper and rosier it grew plump and rosy too. To be married (to a person hitherto unspecified in fancy, whose features remained a blur or a blank), to be the mistress of a dear little house (the house stood out very clear in Flossie's fancy), and the mother of a dear little girl (a figure ever present to her, complete in socks and shoes and ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... expression of stupid amazement came over Friday's face. The design of asteroid and planets wavered into a blur as the Hawk fought unconsciousness; a short, harsh sound came from his lips; he lurched uncertainly. The negro crumpled up and stretched out on the deck. Carse's desire to sleep grew overpowering. Once more, as from a distance, he glimpsed Ku Sui's smile. He tried to back ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... star-tracks fogged, coiled, turned colorless worms of light, went into a single vast blur. Dimly Bart saw old Rugel slump forward, moaning softly; saw the old Lhari pillow his bald head on his veined arms. Then darkness took him; and thinking it was death, Bart felt only numb, regretful failure. I've failed, we'll always fail. The Lhari ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... corn and the health of men and cattle a Power, in short, which, when appealed to under pressing circumstances, produces the precise effects caused by physical energy in the ordinary course of things. To any person who deals sincerely with the subject, and refuses to blur his moral vision by intellectual subtleties, this, I think, will appear a true statement ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... 'Oh, blur an agers, thin, it's welcome you are, Micky asthore,' says Jim; 'how is all wid the man an' ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... again, and the Kansas springtime was in its daintiest green, when a blur of pink was on the few young orchards in the Neosho Valley, and the cottonwoods in the draws were putting forth their glittering tender leaves—in that sweetest time of all the year, a new joy came to me. Most girls married at sixteen in those days, and were ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... consult Prue, and Jessie began to display her purchases before eyes that only saw a blur of shapes and colors, and expatiate upon their beauties to ears that only heard the words—"The splendid cousin is married ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... found I was lost, I had to sit flat down on the floor and take hold of something to keep from lifting the roof off with the profane explosion that was trying to get out of me. I could see the dim blur of the window, but of course it was in the wrong place and could give me no information as to where I was. But I had one comfort—I had not waked Livy; I believed I could find that sock in silence if the night lasted long enough. So I started again and ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... hospital common-room. The summer heat surging up from the burning pavements stagnated between the faded walls. He could not touch the food that he had brought with him. He was faint and sick, and the long table at which he sat, with its white blur of newspapers, rose and fell as though it were floating on an oily sea. But he held out. At five o'clock he was to meet Francey at the gates, and, as though she had some magic gift of relief, he strained towards that ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... drinker, but he'd started on the second bottle before the cabin began to blur on him. Afterwards, he didn't remember making it over ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... leprous taint of bigotry to sully his soul, blur his vision, or cramp his sphere of action, the broad stream of Christian charity flowed from his noble, generous heart, sweeping away obstacles that would have impeded the usefulness of a minister less catholic in sympathy, more hampered ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... blur, blemish, sully, disgrace, tarnish, dishonor; efface, erase, delete, obliterate, expunge; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... be gleaned from familiar letters, as well as from his own history of his time. Yet, after all that has been brought together, Knox remains to many observers a mere hard outline, while to others he is almost an enigma—a blur, bright or black, upon ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... Temple Bar looks, with the loaded coach and the cab going through the central arch, and the blur of the hurrying throng darkening the small lateral ones! A fine old structure,—always reminds a Bostonian of the old arch over which the mysterious Boston Library was said still to linger out its existence late into the present century. But where are the spikes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... sun-lit spires of mountains, shadowed valleys, and mysterious crevasses from which clouds of steam and yellow vapor curled. Still it seemed they must crash against one of those slender pinnacles. Nearer it came like a flash; a dizzying blur, now, that drove directly ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... she had passed into a stage of existence which was like a dream, more poignant and real than life. There was the old gray house with its sloping eaves. Amid the blur of green, and dimly, she saw familiar faces and heard voices as if they came from far across the fields, and Edmond was holding her. Her dead Edmond; her living Edmond, and she felt the beating of his heart against her and the agonizing ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... the fire, and he saw again the red bakneesh hanging over his tent flap, and the words she had scrawled with the end of a charred stick, "In honor of the living." That meant him. Something thick and uncomfortable rose in his throat, and a blur that was not caused by snow or wind filled his eyes. She had made a magnificent fight. And she had won. And it suddenly occurred to him that what she had said in the note was true, and that Scottie Deane could easily have killed him. The next moment he wondered why he had not done that. Deane had ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... been turned to stone, rigidly upright, his hand hanging lifeless at his side, his face expressionless. She felt that she had struck right at his life's vitality—that she had killed him. Yet it was not remorse that blinded her till the white road became a shimmering blur—it was a frightful personal pain which was hers and hers alone. Neither spoke. They passed a crowd of natives returning to the Bazaar. They salaamed, but Nehal Singh made no response, as was his wont. He did not seem to see them. Mechanically he guided his ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... blur, a dark mass behind us, broken by the twinkling of the lights through the gloom, as we swiftly glided down the Severn before the wind. Out upon the bay it was still light, and we steered for the north point ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... wide, sun-swept mesas the steel trail of the railroad runs east and west, diminishing at either end to a shimmering blur of silver. South of the railroad these level immensities, rich in their season with ripe bunch-grass and grama-grass roll up to the barrier of the far blue hills of spruce and pine. The red, ragged shoulders of buttes blot the sky-line here and there; wind-worn and grotesque silhouettes of ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs |
