"Blurred" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spoke to her in metal, not in flesh. It haunted her feelings and her faint imaginations alienly. It discoloured, it scorned the earth, and earth's teachings, and the understanding of life. Rational clearness at all avenues was blurred by it. The thought that Alvan lay wounded and in danger, was one thought: that Marko had stretched him there, was quite another, and was a livid eclipsing thought through which her grief had to work its way to get to heat and a state of burning. She knew ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in fact. So also is it true that the common man derives no material advantage from the national success along this line, though he commonly believes that it all somehow inures to his benefit. It would seem that an ingrown bias of community interest, blurred and driven by a jealously sensitive patriotic pride, bends his faith uncritically to match his inclination. His persuasion is a work of ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... along, and my ejaculation, for that matter, was but a sign of triumph over catching him at the same game of peeping-Tom that we had been playing in the room below. Yet so quickly and over-lappingly do our minds work that at the same moment I had no less than three blurred emotions. I was pleased to find my friend was guilty, I was pleased with the sketch, yet puzzled to know how he had come to make it. Suddenly I ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... anyone who has indulged in ballooning knows fully well. On a clear summer's day I have been able to see the ground beneath with perfect distinctness from a height of 4,500 feet, yet when the craft had ascended a further two or three hundred feet, the panorama was blurred. A film of haze lies between the balloon and the ground beneath. And the character of this haze is continually changing, so that the aerial observer's task is rendered additionally difficult. Its effects are particularly notice able when one attempts to photograph ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... For a time his attention was absorbed in the fragments of speech he heard. He had a doubt whether all were speaking English. Scraps floated to him, scraps like Pigeon English, like 'nigger' dialect, blurred and mangled distortions. He dared accost no one with questions. The impression the people gave him jarred altogether with his preconceptions of the struggle and confirmed the old man's faith in Ostrog. It ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... unfolded the thick bundle of pages and read—and as he read he saw that the words were all blurred by tears, and guessed that they were certainly not tears shed by the exuberant young man who ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... so long as you were below it did not affect you so much. It was when you stepped out of the bucket and struck the pure outer air that you reeled and became dizzy. It was blinding, too. Often at supper have my eyes been so blurred and sore I had to grope around uncertainly for the sugar bowl and ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... impression as I opened the door was that a fire had broken out, for the room was so filled with smoke that the light of the lamp upon the table was blurred by it. As I entered, however, my fears were set at rest, for it was the acrid fumes of strong coarse tobacco which took me by the throat and set me coughing. Through the haze I had a vague vision of Holmes in his dressing-gown ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... Half stunned, he stumbled to his feet, his dazed eyes still blurred with a vision of horsemen, vaguely seen through vapors, stampeding northward; and, at the same instant, she sprang at him, striking the drawn revolver from his hand, tearing the sabre free and flinging it into the gulf. White-faced, desperate, she clung to him with the tenacity of a lynx, winding ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... she said, and the keen old eyes were suddenly blurred and dim. "I want to thank you. One is apt to forget—when one is very lonely—that we've most of us worn love's crown just once—if only for a few moments of our lives. . . . And it's good to be reminded of it, even though it may ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... ideas of the particulars that compose it. Particular impressions have, by virtue of their intrinsic similarity or of the identity of their relations, a tendency to be merged and identified, so that many individual perceptions leave but a single blurred memory that stands for them all, because it combines their several associations. Similarly, when various objects have many common characteristics, the mind is incapable of keeping them apart. It cannot hold clearly so great a multitude of distinctions ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... shimmered and blurred—and suddenly broke apart to reform into something.... She squinched her eyes shut to the hideous vision. And then opened them ...
— Moment of Truth • Basil Eugene Wells
... occurred to me to wonder why my recollections of our arrival and first days in Sydney should be so blurred and unsatisfactorily vague. One would have thought such episodes should stand out very clearly in retrospect. As a fact, they are far less clear to me than many an incident of ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... a shock that he was not alone. His eyelashes were frosted and his eyeballs blurred with the cold, so at first he thought it might be an illusion. But when he had rubbed his eyes hard, he made sure that not very far in front of him was a long white skater in fluttering garments who sped over the ice as fast ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... Father's face in the light from the window; and it looked—well, I'd never seen it look like that before. It was as if something that had been on it for years had dropped off and left it clear where before it had been blurred and indistinct. No, that doesn't exactly describe it either. I can't describe it. But I'll go on and ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... striations, watery and colorless, in the lower slopes of the morning sky, and these were taking on the light of dawn without its hues. Long wind-blown streaks crossed the zenith from east to west and the setting stars were blurred. The moon had worn a narrowing circlet in the ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... study has coincided with the inevitably lengthy shaping of the State standards, and with their review and their coordination on specific interstate streams like the Potomac and its main tributaries, has somewhat blurred our view of this most significant legal machinery of all. For it is through these standards and their enforcement that the fundamental action toward a clean Potomac will be taken. The emphasis in formulating them and reviewing ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... blurred in Clyde's ringing ears. The friendly darkness hid her flaming cheeks. Why, oh why, had she listened? She was not even shocked by Casey's muttered curse. She felt his hand on her arm, drawing her gently back into the deeper shadows. ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... having undertaken to carry $12,000 to Albany, reported the money lost. He was arrested and discharged after much testimony was taken. Whether accused justly or unjustly (most persons thought unjustly) it blurred his career. Conkling had a copy of the proceedings before the criminal court."—Ibid. See also The ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... and again. It seemed to me to be touched up a good deal; it was glazed as well as framed, and the glass blurred some of the details. But there unmistakably was my face, my eyes, my nose and mouth, my head and hand, posed for a professional photographer. And I had never ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... and beautiful. Up to the hour that she let go she had lived as they live who are drugged. She had looked on life with her senses blurred and her ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... party. He found this unexpectedly easy. In fact, after a minute or two, one might almost have said that the hilarity became a little too boisterous, that the laughter almost bordered on the hysterical, that the humor seemed rather blurred for this stage of the evening. Then, presto! the room was in a nervous hush, while Irina lifted a quivering glass to the candle-light, and, in a voice not her own, proposed a toast:—The complete success of Yevgeny Burevsky's ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... corn; she heard the scamper of the squirrels preying upon the ripening ears, and whisking in and out of the woods or dropping into the field from the tips of the boughs overhanging the nearer rows; but it all came blurred to her consciousness. ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... of the ride. 'Twas all a sort of constant changin' sameness. I remember passin' a blurred life-savin' station, with three—or maybe thirty—blurred men jumpin' and laughin' and hollerin'. I found out afterwards that they'd been on the lookout for the bombshell for half an hour. Billings had told ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... She took up her embroidery, whose bright colors blurred and swam together through the tears ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... than in France of towns and villages near the lines. Ammunition had to be accumulated for important occasions and important targets. Thus battles were still separate and distinct in Italy, with perceptible intervals of lull, less apt than in France to become one blurred series of gigantic actions. So too counter-battery work on a great scale was not practised on either side out here, partly for reasons of ammunition supply, and partly for technical reasons connected with the nature of the ground. For in a good caverna one was perfectly ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... library at the Court—one of the longtime exposures which she had taken on the eventful morning when the desk had been opened in the squire's absence. The nearer part of the interior was clear and distinct, but the further half was blurred as if something had moved while the plate was still exposed, while leaning over the open desk was a man's figure, dim and blurred indeed, but recognisable in a flash as that of ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... dreams had eclipsed her girlish memories. Now the dreams had become blurred. She strove to bring them back till her soul ached, till she broke down into miserable weeping. She was alone in a strange, unedifying town; in a strange, vast, commonplace hotel. The cold, moonlit Place de la Vendome, with its memorable column, just opposite her bedroom window, meant ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... there are many events which I have drawn with blurred edges by reason of the distance of time; but from this to the end of my story I have the pettiest details of it in mind, many of them ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... not speak of him that way!" The girl's hands were clasped; the slender, shapely figure was very straight. Her beautiful blue eyes, full of varying lights, flashed, then became dimmed; a suspicion of mist blurred the long, sweeping lashes. "He had a big, noble spark in his soul. And I think of him many, many times!" she repeated, the sweet, gay lips trembling sensitively. "Brave fellow! Brave fellow!" The words fell ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... encouraged her to continue. The history that he gleaned from Cindy's disordered monologue was an old one, of illusion, wilfulness, disaster, cruelty and pride. Standing out from the blurred panorama of her gabble were little clear pictures—an ideal home in the far South; a quickly repented marriage; an unhappy season, full of wrongs and abuse, and, of late, an inheritance of money that promised deliverance; its seizure and waste ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... A blurred sun rises in the sky.... One can see the green valley of Rion and the Bay of Poti by the ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... only consolation is," remarked Kenyon, "that the blurred and imperfect image may still make a very respectable appearance in the eyes of those who have not ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the afternoon the aspect of the sky seemed to promise that ere long we might hope for a welcome change of weather; the deep, brilliant blue of the unclouded dome became blurred as though it were gradually being overspread by a thin and semi-transparent curtain of mist, which gradually resolved itself into that streaky, feathery appearance called by seamen "mare's-tails"; and a bank of horizontal grey cloud gathered in the western quarter, into which ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... the scratched window-panes and the crude prospect, blurred now by the gathering shadows of the early evening. In the yards below, a long freight-train was pulling in from the west, with a switching-engine chasing it to begin the cutting out of the Copah locals. Over in the Red Butte ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... discovered a few sheets of music which had slipped down upon the wires. The sheets were dusty, stained with age, blurred by damp, but one bore the name "Henriette" written in the corner in a large, defiant hand. Joining the fragments, they found it was an arrangement in manuscript ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... of photographs on the table that Frederick Fairfax and his wife had collected during their wedding-tour on the Continent. It was during the early days of the art, and the pictures were as blurred and faded as their lives had since become. Bessie was turning them over with languid interest, when her grandfather, perceiving how she was employed, said he could show her some foreign views that would please her better than those dim photographs. He unlocked a drawer in the ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... shutters nor blind, and was composed of those small square panes that were in vogue a century ago. As I went by it, I threw a hasty, appalled glance behind me, and distinctly saw, even through the blurred and dirty glass, the figures of two women, one pursuing the other over the thick white snow outside. In the rapid view I had of them, I observed only that the first carried something in her hand ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... window, and at that minute the girl who had worked at the type-writer in the back office looked up at him from the crowded platform of the car with her small, intense face, whose intensity seemed to make it stand out from the others around her as from a blurred background of humanity. "May I ask you to kindly wait a moment, Mr. Allbright?" Carroll said, and went out hurriedly, leaving Allbright standing staring in amazement. There had been something in his employer's manner ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of horses' hoofs, stumbling on the rough bridle-track through the "saddle", the clatter of hoof-clipped stones and scrape of gravel down the hidden "siding", and the low sound of men's voices, blurred and speaking in monosyllables and at intervals it seemed, and in hushed, awed tones, as though they carried a corpse. To practical eyes, grown used to such a darkness, and at the nearest point, the passing blurrs would have suggested two riders on bush hacks leading a third with ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... eyes rose from the blurred surface of the news-sheet the picture of the crowd absorbed me, like a stage-spectacle. There were from forty to sixty thousand people assembled, of all ages and classes. Among them were perhaps one thousand, perhaps two thousand, copies ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... violin case. At the sound of her voice Von Barwig started as if he had been shot, and with a half articulate cry he turned and gazed in the direction from whence the voice came. He saw in the dim twilight, for the sun had now nearly gone down, the half-blurred vision of a young lady dressed in the height of fashion. Her features he could not distinguish, as her back was to the window, but he could see that she was a handsome young woman of about twenty years of age. As Von Barwig turned toward her she looked at her note-book ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... congratulating the Navigator on our escape, and I had just told the gun's crew to cease firing at the blurred outlines on the port quarter from which the random shells still came, when there was a sheet of yellow flame and a jar which threw me against the signalman. The latter had been standing near the conning-tower hatch, and unfortunately I knocked him off his ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... herself comfortably under her parasol, intent on the enjoyment of their reconciliation. The two days she had spent with him looked back upon her like a dream from which she had only just awakened. As in a dream, there were blurred outlines and places where the line seemed to have so faded that she could no longer trace it. The most distinct picture was when she stood, her hand affectionately laid on his shoulder, singing Ulick's music. She had forgotten the music and Ulick himself, but her father, how near she ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... his egoism along with his old name and possessions. Her life was her own to deal with. Nobody would be injured by its termination. Aubrey, indeed, would benefit considerably. And he——? His figure was blurred through the tears that ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... irritation that he always roused in her. He stood in the light of the hall lamp, a fat man, a soft hat pushed to the back of his head, a bag in one hand. His face was weak and good-tempered, his eyes had once been fine but now they were dim and blurred; there were dimples in his fat cheeks; he wore on his upper lip a ragged and untidy moustache and he had two indeterminate chins. His expression was mild, kindly, now a little ashamed, now greatly indignant. It was a pity, as he often said, that he had not more control over his feelings. Maggie ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... seemed to bring to her mother a slight improvement, and Sally could again sometimes steal away with her slate and book, to sit alone on the big bowlder, and study. But, oftentimes, the print on the page, or the scrawl on the slate, became blurred. Nowadays, the tears came weakly to her eyes, and, instead of hating herself for them and dashing them fiercely away, as she would have done a year ago, she sat listlessly, and gazed ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... photographs of the chartered vessel, of Dr. Hunter and his instruments, and of his daughter, Helen, who acted as his secretary. She looked not at all like a scientist, Dan recalled. In fact, her face had seemed rather pretty, even in the blurred newspaper half-tone. ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... who sprang from stone to stone with the surefootedness of a mountain goat, we soon reached the cluster of rocks, the bases of which were embedded in the now hard and stiffened sand, and almost at the same moment another heavy rain squall swept down and blurred sea and sky and ...
— Susani - 1901 • Louis Becke
... comes to Ruddy Cove in the night, when the shadows are black and wet, and the wind, blowing in from the sea, is charged with a clammy mist. The lights in the cottages are blurred by the fog. They form a broken line of yellow splotches rounding the harbour's edge. Beyond is deep night and a wilderness into which the wind drives. In the morning the fog still clings to the coast. Within the cloudy wall it is all glum and dripping wet. When a veering wind sweeps the fog away, ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... them, hardly a moment's respite from some irksome task, the ache in the heart for home and the loved ones there, the iron discipline of the war-machine of which they formed a part, the chance of wounds and that mysterious crisis called death—these were the elements which made up the blurred vision in ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... roared with a seven-fold tumult in her ears, and danced before her eyes. All things swam together, as in her blurred sight her cousins came wavering ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... been able to make out Carmena standing in the midst of a close group of Apaches. But she and the Indians and the cliff wall had all merged into a blurred whirl before his dizzy eyes by the time he struck the cliff foot. With the slackening of the rope he rolled over, too giddy even to attempt to steady himself ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... our hero, was a man of great powers. He was a renowned professor at Oxford, celebrated for his attainments in theology and in physical science. But the peace-loving man of letters died ere his boys had grown to youth, and, alas, the memory of him is blurred and indistinct in their minds. They remember a quiet, soft-voiced, tender-hearted man who was tall and of goodly frame, yet had the scholar's air, about whose knees they would cluster and hear enchanting tales, the plots of which have long since got tangled in the red tape of life. He had, ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... had remembered her. She was telling him, in a voice that rippled cool and low like the stream, of Mrs. Caley's indisposition. Her face, now turned toward the fields, was dipped in the dreaming radiance; now it was blurred, vaguely appealing, disturbing. Her soft youth was creamy, distilling an essence, a fragrance, like a flower; it was one with the immaculate flood of light bathing the world ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... backward, and which Miss Birdseye suddenly felt for while she talked, with unsuccessful irrelevant movements. She had a sad, soft, pale face, which (and it was the effect of her whole head) looked as if it had been soaked, blurred, and made vague by exposure to some slow dissolvent. The long practice of philanthropy had not given accent to her features; it had rubbed out their transitions, their meanings. The waves of sympathy, of enthusiasm, had wrought upon them in the same way in which the waves of time finally modify ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... the edge of his bed, glancing at the clothing laid out for him. He felt tired and disinclined for the exertion of undressing. The shades were up; night quicksilvered the window-panes so that they were like a dark mirror reflecting his face. He inspected his darkened features curiously; the blurred and ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... alike his heart and reason. Instead of gaining the one thing, it seemed to him that all had been lost. His present existence was as focusless as an eye after its lens has been extracted. His past had been opaque, his future would be permanently blurred. And for what good had been all the pain? It would have been far better, far more sane, if he had clung stoutly to the flaming horns of his hereditary Calvinism. Infinitely better to feel their scorching touch than to drift into a state of apathy past any feeling! And Brenton ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... sugar—in easy reach—and sugar is All Good to the young body. Remembered pleasure, strong immediate desire, the eye's guidance, the hand's impulse—all urged to perform the natural act of eating. Against it,—what? The blurred remembrance of promiscuous pain, only by main force to be associated with that coveted, visible pleasure; and the dawning power of inhibition. To check strong natural desire by no better force than ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... to a small auxiliary recorder. He had to tape his voice through a circuit which would alter it beyond recognition. And, of course, the whole thing had to be blurred, had to fade and come back, had to be full of squeals and buzzes and the crackling talk of the stars. No easy job to blend all those elements, in null-gee at that. Coffin lost himself in the task. He dared not do otherwise, for then he would be ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson
... Nimrod, and everything was swallowed up in a dark misty vapour that cut me off from every object. Even Blondey's nose and the ground at my feet were blurred. Regardless of possibly near-by elk, I raised a frightened, yell. My voice swirled around me and dropped. I tried again, but ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... dizzily. Cold perspiration stood out on his brow. The excitement, following hours of fatigue and near starvation, was too much for him; his head swam; his eyes blurred. ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... sight of it had sickened. Now the physical effect had gone. But the nausea in passing had been replaced by another sensation, deadlier, equally human, that made her red and hot, blurred her eyes, set her quivering, shook her, put her thoughts on ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... it is all rather blurred now,—the place where I pulled up was a sort of public square. I swung myself off Old Blunderbore just outside a tavern. An ostler ran up to me at once to hold him. So I gave him a silver piece what it was worth I did not know, saying firmly ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... regard to names, there was obscurity enough, to begin with. In the first place, they were Icelandic names falling upon the Italian ears of old Nicolo and Antonio, and spelled by them according to their own notions; in the second place, these outlandish names, blurred and defaced withal in the weather-stained manuscript, were a puzzle to the eye of young Nicolo, who could but decipher them according to his notions. The havoc that can be wrought upon winged words, subjected ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... sky, the gray hills, the green willows, all blurred in his sight, that seemed to hold clear ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... recollection neither increased nor diminished her pain; she thought of that night with such a supreme detachment of self that it seemed as if her heart were utterly dead. She turned by the dye factory and stood on the stone bridge which here crosses the Avon. The blurred reflection of the stars in the slowly moving water caused her eyes again to ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... chilled the purpose of any child. It may have been this which suddenly brought the tears to Mary's eyes, or it may have been that her womanly little breast guessed the loneliness in her father's heart. Whatever it was, she unsteadily crossed the room, her sight blurred but her plan as steadfast as ever, and a moment later she was climbing on Josiah's knee, her arms tight around his neck, sobbing as though it would shake her little frame ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... past, to pursue after wild life with a camera; but a thousand disheartening failures left him still grasping the inviolable shade, still confident that in photography, if it could only be given with rapidity and precision, lay the naturalist's hope. Blurred negatives were all the spoil, and, sorry enough, we bore back after long days of tossing and climbing among the Outer Islands; but we had the reward of living among the birds. They filled our thoughts, our lives for the time:—great ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... bird,—some little favorite, I suppose; for it was worked out with a special love, and I saw on the leaf that sign with which once or twice in my life I have had a letter sealed,—a round spot where the paper is slightly corrugated, and, if there is writing there, the letters are somewhat faint and blurred. Most of the pages were surrounded with emblematic traceries. It was strange to me at first to see how often she introduced those homelier wild-flowers which we call weeds,—for it seemed there was none of them too humble for her to love, and none too little cared for by Nature to be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... in a narrow V at the neck, was all of semi-transparent reds, the brilliant happy reds of the Chinese. In fact, but for her head, she would have been only half visible as she advanced against the background of the screen. Mary's impression of her was blurred, but Stefan, whose artist's eye observed everything, noticed that her narrow feet were encased in heelless satin shoes which followed the natural shape of ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... late years I keep asking those questions at death-beds. I seem to myself constantly as if trying to hold back the curtain and look through. But the look through is all blurred and indistinct. ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... in the marvellous photographs taken by Janssen at Meudon, with exposures reduced at times to 1/100000 of a second! By their means, also, the curious phenomenon known as the reseau photospherique has been made evident.[509] This consists in the diffusion over the entire disc of fleeting blurred patches, separated by a reticulation of sharply-outlined and regularly-arranged granules. The imperfect definition in the smudged areas may be due to agitations in the solar or terrestrial atmosphere, unless it be—as Dr. Schemer thinks possible[510]—merely ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... and a seat made of bright green tiles—altogether a very retired and pleasant and suitable spot in which to hold a committee meeting. Exactly behind the seat stood an enormous jar of terra-cotta, colored red, and decorated with Greek figures in black silhouette, rather blurred and rubbed off, but still distinguishable. No doubt its original use had been to store water, wine, or olive-oil, but nowadays it was merely an ornament to the garden. A plant pot full of scarlet geraniums rested on its head, and an arbutula ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... doubly irksome through his feeling of injury in being kept from the girl whose personality he constructed from the sound of her voice, and set over his fancy in an absolute sovereignty. The image he had created of her remained a dim and blurred vision throughout the day, but by night it became distinct and compelling. One evening, late in the fall, he could endure the stress no longer, and he yielded to the temptation which had beset him from the first moment he renounced his purpose of returning in person ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... the Parrott stirred, shot forward abruptly. In two seconds it was fifty yards distant, its silhouette already blurred, its wheels lifting from the rim of ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... preservation of such a man, but released his son and most of the rest, as was his custom: for some came over to him immediately of their own volition, and others later, so as to approach him after time should have somewhat blurred his memory. So these escaped, but Afranius and Faustus would not come to him of their own free will, for they felt sure of destruction. They fled to Mauritania, where they were captured by Sittius. Caesar put them ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... trip down the bay and into the sound that night was a wonderful adventure. She remembered it afterward far more vividly than the shipwreck, which became blurred in retrospect, so that she soon began to think of it as of some half-forgotten nightmare. To begin with, the personality of Murray O'Neil intrigued her more and more. The man was so strong, so sympathetic, and he had such a resistless ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... attention was for the circling forest, and the hills. That was where the army of his country lay. Nothing was to be expected from the lake. Victory would come from the woods, and he looked so long at the trees that they blurred together into one mass. He knew that the English and Americans were near, but just how near he could not gather ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... chain that binds us to the ordinary world of consciousness; the veil of illusion has fallen again between us and real vision, we are again among the shadows, with some general impressions more or less blurred, but the vivid vision of the Poet which made us feel in the manifestations he created, the very Idea of Life itself—has faded from us, we are no longer in the Ideal world which is ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... away in pursuit of his last companion with a winged gallop. It seemed that the wind caught him up and buoyed him from stride to stride, and the cowpunchers with hungry, burning eyes watched without a word until the grey and the chestnut blurred on the horizon and dipped out of view together. The spell was broken in the same instant by a stream of profanity floating up from the rear. It was Lew Hervey approaching ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... could see Farvie's beautiful nose and chin against it and Anne's feather all out of curl. Dear Anne! dear Farvie! Everything smelled of dirt, good, honest dirt, not city sculch, and I heard a robin. Anne heard him, too. I saw her smile." But really what Anne plucked out of the moment was a blurred feeling of peace. The day was like a cool, soft cheek, the cheek one kisses with calm affection, knowing it will not be turned away. It was she who first became aware of Denny, the hackman, and said to him in her liquid voice that ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... into short lengths. In an instant the awful meaning of these preparations flashed across his mind. They intended to boil him alive! For a moment he felt sick and dizzy. All things spun in a mad whirl before his blurred vision, and he feared his senses were departing. Recovering himself by a supreme effort of will, and animated by an access of fury, he sprang forward, overturned the tub, so that its contents were poured on the hissing flames, instantly extinguishing ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... had the thrill of his life for seven miles. I guess his wildest cravings for adventure was appeased for the time. He flattened out at the rear end of the last car and let the scenery flash by. He said afterward it looked just one blurred mess to him. His two cars dropped the sixteen hundred and forty-five feet and made the seven-mile distance in four and one-half minutes by standard railroad time. Ed was feeling fairly good, never having rode so fast in his life before, and he was hoping nothing serious would get in ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... in imagination so vividly through that day that when the day really arrived it found her physically and mentally unresponsive; the endless reiteration of names sounded meaninglessly in her ears, the crowding faces blurred. She was passively satisfied to be there, and content with the touch of hands and the pleasant-voiced formalities of people pressing toward her from ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... kept his promise, we fall to pitying Shakespeare, the bestower of immortality. In the great temple raised by his genius to his own undying glory, one narrow door opens into a secret, silent crypt, where his image, blurred and indistinct, is hardly discernible through the gloomy atmosphere, heavy and dim as if with sighs and tears. Here is no clew, no issue, and we return to the shrine filled with light and life and warmth and melody; with knowledge and love of man, and worship of God and nature. There is ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... not been a matter of life and horrid death. Through it all Roldan was vaguely conscious of approaching hoofbeats, but there was no room in his consciousness for hope or despair. He was not even aware that he was panting as if his lungs and throat were bursting, nor even that his vision was a trifle blurred from constant and rapid change of focus and surcharged veins. But he executed his dance of life as unerringly as if fresh from his bed and bath. The bear, a clumsy creature at best, and streaming and blinded with his blood, was slackening a little, but there was life in him yet, and twice its ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... slaughtered elephants and elephant-riders, horses and horse-riders, and (car-warriors and) car-drivers. I did not in that battle, O king, see a single elephant or steed or human warrior that was not struck with Partha's shafts. Their vision blurred by dust and darkness, thy warriors became perfectly cheerless and unable to distinguish one another. Urged on by fate and with their vital limbs cut open and mangled with shafts, they began to wander, or limp, or fall down. And some amongst them, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... more beat on the sun-baked soil. Two figures grew out of the twilight from behind the barn, and the woman knew that her warning had gone for naught. She watched them until they were swallowed up by the growing dusk. The last dim outline blurred itself into the pasture. Then ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... authorship, nor their immunity from mistake, nor the absolute purity of their texts. But taking them as a whole he discerns in them a Character which, if you accept them at all and on any terms, you cannot mistake. Even if the copy is ever so imperfect, ever so unskilful, ever so blurred and defaced, there is no missing the features any more than a man need miss the principle of a pattern because it is rudely or confusedly traced. He looks at these "biographies" as a geologist might do at a disturbed series of strata; and he feeds his eye upon them till he gets ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... photograph was a little faded—Martin's eyes had lost some of their appealing darkness and the curves of the mouth she had loved were dim.... She put her face close to the faded face in the photograph, and looked at it. Gradually it blurred in a mist of tears, and she could feel her heart beating very slowly, as if each beat ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... primitive woman confronted by a simple impulse. Day after day, when they met and she stood a little way off, listening to his words, holding him with her look, the undefined terror of the new conquest became faint and blurred like the memory of a dream, and the certitude grew distinct, and convincing, and visible to the eyes like some material thing in full sunlight. It was a deep joy, a great pride, a tangible sweetness ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... the disciples could have seen that the essential childhood was meant, and not a blurred and half-obliterated childhood, the most selfish child might have done as well, but could have done no better than the one we have supposed in whom the true childhood is more evident. But when the child was employed as a manifestation, utterance, and sign of the ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... Dillingham Young." The "Dillingham" had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, the letters of "Dillingham" looked blurred, as though they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called "Jim" and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... is," answered Derrick, though with a slight hesitation in his voice as he thought of the one place he had not been quite sure of. This was where the plan had been somewhat blotted and blurred, so that he could not see whether or not two lines joined each other. Having made up his mind that they ought to be joined, he had thus drawn them on his tracing. It was such a small thing that he did not consider it worth mentioning. Thus, without meaning ...
— Derrick Sterling - A Story of the Mines • Kirk Munroe
... dusk came in at the blurred windows of the room. Pennoyer threw down his pen and tossed his drawing over on the wonderful heap of stuff that hid the table. "It's too dark to work." He lit a pipe and walked about, stretching his shoulders like a ...
— The Third Violet • Stephen Crane
... herself to work for him. And the jade repaid him, as usual, by showing him what she could do but refusing to divulge the moving why she did it. She gave him for his pains sometimes a light, and sometimes a dark butterfly, with different degrees of blurred or enlarged and vivid markings, from chrysalids subjected to exactly the ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... crowd in the saloon, which had a smoky, blurred look through the open door. Some of the old gambling gear had been uncovered and pushed out from the wall. A faro game was running, with a dozen or more players, at the end of the bar; several poker tables stretched across the gloomy front of what had been the ballroom of more hilarious ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... narrow seat of the little cabin. The Marchesino jumped aboard. The machine in the stern throbbed. They rushed forward into the blackness of the impenetrable night, the white of the leaping foam, the hissing of the rain, the roaring of the wind. In a blurred and hasty vision the lights of Frisio's ran before them, fell back into the storm like things defeated. Hermione fancied she discerned for a second the blind man's scarlet face and open mouth, the Padrone at a window waving a frantic adieu, having only just become aware of their departure. But ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... lived at Coombe Oaks thirty years or so, and the thick dull bark had grown, after the scales or caking had come upon the heart, after the capital of the column had fallen, after the painting had been blurred, it came about that old Flamma, Mrs. Iden's father, died ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... vapor," etc. The last verse of Susan was to be got rid of, at all events. It threw a kind of dubiety upon Susan's moral conduct. Susan is a servant-maid. I see her trundling her mop, and contemplating the whirling phenomenon through blurred optics; but to term her "a poor outcast" seems as much as to say that poor Susan was no better than she should be,—which I trust was not what you meant to express. Robin Goodfellow supports himself without that stick of a moral which you have thrown away; but how I can be brought in ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... home with her, and later, alone in her room, read the poems it contained. Tears blurred her eyes as she read and read again the verses dated the day before. Such a lilting, joyous ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd
... countryside as through a glass darkly. A shadowy file of poplars, a grey promise of meadowland, a sable thicket, far in the distance a great blurred mass rearing a sombre head, a chain of silent villages seemingly twined about our road, and once in a long while the broad, brave flash of laughing water—these and their ghostly like made up our changing neighbourhood. Then came a link in the chain that even Wizard Night could not transfigure—sweet, ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... suddenly blurred everything else, but Meta suddenly realized she was gripping it; she gave a little, gentle cry, and cradled the abused ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... the room. A shadow blurred the sunlight in Nancy's face —there was uneasiness in it, and disappointment. A procession of disturbing thoughts began to troop through her mind. Saying nothing aloud, she sat with her hands in her lap; now and then she clasped ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Bill on his rare appearances in London, but for prudential motives the latter had struck Bludston out of his itinerary and could give no information. At last Paul ceased altogether to think of them. They belonged to a far-distant past already becoming blurred ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... blinking her tawny eyes—like the eyes of a lion in color—at the street. Not for the world would she let him see that she wanted to cry! A figure, blurred to indistinctness, appealed in a doorway nearly opposite, stood for a moment looking up at the reddened sky, and came across the street. As the tears were beaten back she saw and recognized him, with a ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... the multitude of people. The eyes of all the citizens of London were bent upon that long wide space of sand within the lists; many, blurred by tears, could not bear to look at the white figure in the midst of ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... battle up the stairway? It was a crucifixion of struggle, an age-long nightmare of agony. Time after time, as my consciousness blurred, the temptation was upon me to cease all effort and let myself blur down into the ultimate dark. I fought my way step by step. Margaret was now quite unconscious, and I lifted her body step by step, or dragged it several steps at a time, ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... For a time his attention was absorbed in the fragments of speech he heard. He had a doubt whether all were speaking English. Scraps floated to him, scraps like Pigeon English, like "nigger" dialect, blurred and mangled distortions. He dared accost no one with questions. The impression the people gave him jarred altogether with his preconceptions of the struggle and confirmed the old man's faith in Ostrog. It was only slowly he could bring himself ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... crunching beneath the runners, and a fine mist of snow beat against the sleigh, but the girl leaning forward, a tense figure, with nerveless hands clenched upon the reins, saw nothing but the blue-grey riband of trail that steadily unrolled itself before her. At length, however, a blurred mass, which she knew to be a birch bluff, grew out of the white waste, and presently a cluster of darker smudges shot up into the shape of a log-house, sod stables, and strawpile granary. A minute or two later, she pulled the team up with an effort, and a man, who flung the door of the ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... purple dawn of a morning two or three days later, Derby emerged from the house of Donna Marcella, saddled his horse and for the first time without his attendant carabinieri, started for the mines. The faint light showed him only a blurred and indistinct landscape; and in the crisp stillness the leather of his saddle creaked a monotonous accompaniment to the horse's hoofs, which struck the road with ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... as to make any versified translation of a poem but an imperfect reproduction of the archetype. It is like an imperfect mirror that renders but a partial likeness, in which essential features are blurred or distorted. Dante himself, the first modern critic, declared that "nothing harmonized by a musical bond can be transmuted from its own speech without losing all its sweetness and harmony," and every fresh attempt at translation ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... in San Francisco, one that possessed for me the strongest attraction. It was bosomed in the sandhills south of Market Street,—I know not between what streets, for they had all been blurred or quite obliterated by drifts of sifting sand. It was a small house fenced about; but the fence was for the most part buried under sand, and looked as if it were a rampart erected for the defense of this ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... down on her bed and turned over the new additions to her gallery. Three of them were the usual rather blurred newspaper prints, but, as Irene had said, two were on superior paper and very clear. One of these represented an officer with a moustache, the other was a private and clean shaven. Marjorie looked at them at first rather casually, ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... an entrance to a region where the most startling and varied things were ever happening, to a boy from the glen this town end of the valley is a sample of Paradise for beauty and interest. Gilian went through it with his blue eyes blurred to-day, but for wont he found it full of charms and fancies. To go under its white-harled archways on a market day was to come upon a new world, and yet not all a new world, for its spectacles of life ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... care and fear instinctively set aside what little love was left for me I do not now wonder. Was it well, or ill, what you did when you bid me go? In God's time I have learned to think it well. That hour is to me now like a blurred dream. To-day I can bless the anger and the sense of duty to our children which drove me forth—too debased a thing to realize my loss. I have won again my self-control, thank God! am a man once more. You have, have ...
— Mr. Kris Kringle - A Christmas Tale • S. Weir Mitchell
... favorite expression of agreement was slightly blurred by a mouthful of tomato. "Varr owns Wimpelheimer's store. If he catches Wimpy bein' too accommodatin' to us chaps he's fixed to make trouble for him." He nodded portentously. ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... haste and absorption, and sometimes she rested her chin in the cup of her palm, and with the pencil poised in the other hand looked dreamily out on the village, its huddle of roofs and steeples all blurred into positive beauty by ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... at the table passed an uncertain hand over his face to clear his blurred vision, poised the cruel blade in his hand, and sent it flashing forward with incredible swiftness. The steel buried itself two inches deep in the soft pine beside Bucky's head. So close had it shaved him that a drop of ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... soft black, hushed silver—above them the whole radiant helmet of heaven is white with its stars. From the house they have left, glowing yellow in all its windows, unreal against the night as if it were only a huge flat toy made out of paper with a candle burning behind it, comes music, blurred but insistent, faint as if heard over water, dull and throbbing like horse-hoofs muffled with leather treading ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... have been full of secrets. They seemed to be piling themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and layers of velvet shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the dusky walls of books, the smoke-blurred sculpture of the ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... hair amid cloud tail daffodils. They have known nothing but beauty, or at the most a beautiful unhappiness. Everything there moves in procession or according to ritual, and the agony of grief, it is felt, must be concealed. There are no faces blurred with tears there; some traditional gesture signifying sorrow is all that is allowed. I have looked with longing eyes into this world. It is Ildathach, the Many-Colored Land, but not the Land of the Living Heart. That island where the ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... tied a linsey-woolsey jacket by its arms about her waist, and put out the candles. Outside the blast was steadily in progress at the stack; the clear glow of the flame shifted over the nearby walls, glinted on the new yellow of more distant foliage, fell in sharp or blurred traceries against ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... watched the inspanning absently. In truth, he, too, was conscious of a sensation of regret. He felt ashamed of himself for it, but there it was; he was sorry to leave the place. For the last week or so he had been living in a dream, and everything outside that dream was blurred, indistinct as a landscape in a fog. He knew the objects were there, but he could not quite appreciate their relative size and position. The only real thing was his dream; all else was as vague as those far-off people and ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... at home in the saddle. Indeed, it was in the saddle that Hetty Torrance remembered him most vividly, hurling his half-tamed broncho straight at a gully down which the nondescript pack streamed, while the scarcely seen shape of a coyote blurred by the dust, streaked the prairie in ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... laughed my master to himself at the discovery. What cared he for rats? He pulled his chair back to the table, and buried himself in his book for the next three hours, until his lamp began to burn low, and the letters on the pages grew blurred and dim, and the rats had scuffled back by the way they came, and my flagging hands pointed to ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... lying behind us in her winter black numbness, her aspect seemed more forbidding than ever, for only the bare steep hill-sides could be seen; the pine forest and white distant mountains were all blotted and blurred out of sight by a heavy pall ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... again. The light was growing, and the crests of the combers gleamed a livid white. Their steep breasts were losing their grayness and changing to dusky blue and slatey green, but their blurred coloring was atoned for by their grandeur of form. They came on, ridge on ridge, in ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... chamber came the solemn tones of an organ and the full voices of a choir. The softened harmonies seemed to float into their torn hearts, and they wept. The gray dawn was creeping in. It blurred the red light ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... of the stars blurred by the movements of the swimming animal, and that it was going on past them; but it was too dark for them to distinguish the creature, which apparently was making for the forest, but altered its course and began to swim for the tree where the party ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... over his boy, and kissed him. If his sight were dimmed as he did so, by something that for a moment blurred the little face, and made it indistinct to him, his mental vision may have been, for that short time, the ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... a moist film on the window through which the street lamps showed blurred and indistinct, and he rubbed the pane clear with the tips of his fingers (he described every action to T. ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... very short time the town was astir. Like a breath of hope the whisper flew from house to house. Doors closed for the night were thrown open, and wondering children questioned their weeping mothers. Blurred images of husbands and fathers long since given over for dead stood out clear and distinct, smiling with bright faces ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... thoughts of beauty and loveliness direct, without any intervening symbols at all. The emotions which beautiful things had aroused in me upon earth were all there, in the new life, but not confused or blurred, as they had been in the old life, by the intruding symbols of ugly, painful, evil things. That was all gone like a mist. I could not think an evil or ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... able to be out, to explain the meaning of these terms a little more fully to me. If poor Brown's knees are not better soon, I shall be on kneesy about him. [Here the diary has the appearance of being blurred with tears.] A bob-tail flush, I learn, is something very disagreeable to have. One gentleman said last evening that another bob-tail flush would certainly paralyze him. I gather from that that it is something like a hectic flush. I can understand the game ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... back to her valley town when the budded lilacs dripped with rain and the wooded hillsides were blurred with ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds |
