"Out of the blue" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... daughter into the tonneau with easy grace and then motioned the two boys to precede him. He was not at all bad looking, Armitage decided. Tall and rather wasp-waisted he was, nevertheless well set up, and his tailor easily might have left a pound or so of padding out of the blue jacket and still have avoided the impression that the Prince was narrow-backed. His manner certainly bore every impress of courtly breeding and the insolence of rank was by no means lacking, as Armitage learned the next instant, when a man whose back was strangely familiar, suddenly ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... acquaintance of his Spanish relations; he used to talk about them, the Riegos, and Veronica used to talk of what he said of them until they came to stand for Romance, the romance of the outer world, to me. One day, a little before Ralph and Veronica became engaged, these Spaniards descended out of the blue. It was Romance suddenly dangled right before my eyes. It was Romance; you have no idea what it meant to me to ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... took no part in these struggles. Occasionally they cried out a sharp warning as Cheplahgan came plunging down out of the blue, over the head of Ismaques; but they seemed to know perfectly how the unequal contest must end, and they always had a deal of jabber among themselves over it, the meaning of which I could ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... burdens or weapons stalked in an uncouth frieze round the apartments. Above were bull-headed, stork-headed, cat-headed, owl-headed statues, with viper-crowned, almond-eyed monarchs, and strange, beetle-like deities cut out of the blue Egyptian lapis lazuli. Horus and Isis and Osiris peeped down from every niche and shelf, while across the ceiling a true son of Old Nile, a great, hanging-jawed crocodile, was ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... its kind. And sometimes a cruel-eyed, hook-beaked, trim, well-bred looking hawk would perch there on the roof—quite alone, let me tell you—and gaze around as if wondering where all the other birds could have gone to! And once in a while also a splendid white-headed eagle would come down out of the blue, and wing low over the barn, and scream his thin, terrifying yelp, as if he were hoping there might be something like spring lambs hidden in the barn. But none of these things, affairs of the garish, dazzling, common day, moved in ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Out of the blue heaven fell the bolt. The mails on May Day morning brought to the desk of every manager of every industry in Blackwater, and to every building contractor, a formal document setting forth in terms courteous but ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... but fitful, and it was like looking for a needle in a haystack to raise that tiny boat out of the blue immensity. But he put the Ghost through her best paces so as to get between the deserters and the land. This accomplished, he cruised back and forth across what he knew must ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... bird I could easily believe the accounts my uncle gave me. I remembered, when on board the Bussorah Merchant, seeing some tropic birds, which, like the frigate-bird, can ascend to a vast height. One appeared out of the blue sky, when, descending suddenly towards the ship like a falling star, it checked its course, and hovering for a while over our masts, darted away with its two long projecting tail-feathers streaming in the air towards a shoal of flying-fish, which had just then risen from ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... gently and slowly (like letting a lid down on a box of playthings) and then he closed the other eye the same way; and then he knew nothing at all until suddenly a Voice came clap out of the blue sky, calling his name, "Andy Gordon, man! Andy Gordon!" ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... to say. "By Jove, I'm glad to see you again." The latter sentence was not quite audible, but sufficiently so to send Mrs. Devereux' lorgnettes up to her nose. Sanchia herself, receiving civilities as if born to them, impelled her to keep them there. She had appeared silently and suddenly out of the blue. And now she hovered, smiling, fair, and unconcerned, like a goddess out of a chariot come to deal judgment, and listened charitably to Mr. Chevenix. How odd! How more than odd! Mrs. Wilmot looked as if her eyes were full of tears, but let nothing ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... was on the tip of my tongue to give orders to abandon the gun, when suddenly out of the blue there appeared on the bank above us a horse, looking ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... hope deferred.—And then, out of the blue, arose first Diego de Escobar's small ship, and later the two good ships sent by Don ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... the pilot killed by eleven bullets and the observer wounded. He then chased the other plane, whose pilot soon lost his taste for fighting, dropped into a heavy cloud bank, and got away. No odds were too great for our airmen. I have seen one aeroplane swoop down out of the blue to attack a formation of six enemy machines, sending one crashing to earth and dispersing the remainder. In one brief fight another pilot drove down three German planes. The airman does not talk of his work, and we knew that what we saw and heard ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... is that the Argonauts of the Pacific were blown in out of the blue sea—most of them. They had had a taste of the tropics on the way; paroquets and Panama fevers were their portion; or, after a long pull and a strong pull around the Horn, they were comparatively ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... form of my Life, lonely as never yet was lonely man, driven by anguish unspeakable, powerless, and no longer aught but a conscious misery;—as there I looked about me for help, unable to go on or to turn back, and clung to the fleeting, extinguished life with an endless longing: then, out of the blue distances, from the hills of my ancient bliss, came a shiver of twilight, and at once snapped the bond of birth, the fetter of the Light. Away fled the glory of the world, and with it my mourning; the sadness flowed together ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... further he took note of the fine mass of the great dry-goods store on the hither corner, blocking itself out of the blue- black night, and of the Gothic beauty of the church beyond, so near that the coffle of captives might have issued from its sculptured portal, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... watching her companion at work on the savage and sinister-looking thing in his hands. He was splicing the two pieces together with a strip of the brown cloth-like stuff which is wrapped round the stalks of the cocoa-palm fronds. The thing seemed to have been hurled here out of the blue by some ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... with brands from the fire. Then with that blissful feeling that nothing but a good dinner can give, we lay at full length on the deep white moss, peace- fully puffing smoke at the stars as they blinked sleepily one by one out of the blue of the great arch above us until the whole firmament was glittering with a mass of sparkling heaven gems. The soft perfume of the forest pervaded the atmosphere; the aurora borealis appeared in the northern sky, and its waves of changing light swept the heavens; the vast silence of the wilderness ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... out of the blue, and sailed on slow wing over the hollow and ravine. He knew instinctively that it was the bald eagle of the night before, drawn back with a fascination it could not resist to the place where it had been frightened so badly. But it did not alight. Keeping at a good height, it circled about and ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... out of the blue mountains, and down the pleasant vale of Argos, and away and out to sea. And away and out to sea before it floated the mother and her babe, while all who watched them wept, save that cruel ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... robes roaring from the green hells of the sea Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be; On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl, Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl; They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,— They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound. And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide, And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide, And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest, ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... mind your sticking to the Regiment, as you say, for a bit longer. Your father and Stella's father each took their turn at soldiering. It is as well to be prepared—in case of need. There might be a bolt out of the blue sky. So much more reason for being happy ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... shouted for joy, and all the goats caught his spirit and jumped and sprang around as if it were a great festival. The sun shone cheerfully down out of the blue sky, and after the great rain, all the little plants were so fresh, and the yellow and red flowers so bright, it seemed to Moni as if he had never seen the mountains and the valley and the whole world so beautiful before. He didn't let the little kid leave him the ...
— Moni the Goat-Boy • Johanna Spyri et al
... Katy, trying to get by. "What can be going to happen? Oh, there's Aunt Izzie! Aunt Izzie, who's coming? What are you moving the things out of the Blue-room for?" ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... celestial visions brighter? Might not St. Francis have appeared in the centre of a celestial glory to the dreaming Pope, or his soul been seen of the poor monk, rising through more radiant clouds? Look, however, how radiant, in the small space allowed out of the blue, they are in reality. You cannot anywhere see a lovelier piece of Giottesque colour, though here, you have to mourn over the smallness of the piece, and its isolation. For the face of St. Francis himself ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... Page's editorial fervour when Miss Mary Johnston's "Prisoners of Hope" first fell out of the blue sky into his Boston office. Page's joy was not less keen because the young author was a Virginia girl, and because she had discovered that the early period of Virginia history was a field for romance. When, a few months afterward, Page was casting about for an Atlantic serial, Miss ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... Out of the blue waters of the Atlantic the Ethiopia ran, on Saturday, September 11, into the mud-coloured estuary of the Cross and Calabar Rivers. On the left lay the flat delta of the Niger, ahead stretched the landscape of mangrove as far as the eye could range; to the south- ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... aloud. The Royal Hospital, Greenwich, showed itself in the distance like a domed island rising fabulously out of the blue-green water. Even far off, before he could decipher the main contours of the gigantic quadruple pile, the vision excited him. His mind, darkened by the most dreadful apprehensions concerning Marguerite, dwelt on it darkly, sardonically, and yet with pleasure. And he proudly compared his ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... other. "But I want him out of the blue room, and out of Fontenoy! and now, Dick, I've got a piece to write this morning on the ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... hour after hour since first New York had risen out of the blue indistinctness of the landfall. With the daylight he experienced an ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... its appearance! A reddish-brown mass of rock, rising abruptly out of the blue water, really a kind of crown in form, but not more than a couple of square rods in extent, and about three feet high ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... William came to us out of the blue. One morning I drew a tin pail of water, bright and splashing from the well, and turned to pour a little of it into the birds drinking-trough, a stone hollowed out at the top. I did not do so, however, for a good reason—a man was sitting ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Moreover, there are those who feel no call to follow conscience; how could we prove to them that they ought? Is it not the height of irrationality to bow down before an unexplained and mysterious impulse and allow it to sway our conduct without knowing why? If the "ought" is really shot out of the blue at us, if there is no justification, no imperious demand for morality but the existence of this inner push, why might we not raise our heads, refuse to be dominated by it, and live the life of free men, following the happy breezes ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... And out of the blue-black convexity within a star point of one of the opened pyramids a lance of intense green flame darted, a lightning bolt as real as any hurled ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... terrors rushed upon him, and he shrank back instinctively into the shelter of the bush. As he did so, a draught of air fanned him, and a large, winged body swept ominously and silently past. A hawk, driving down out of the blue, had ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... Severn from my sketch of the sky in the afternoon of the 6th of August, 1880, at Brantwood, two hours before sunset. You are looking west by north, straight towards the sun, and nearly straight towards the wind. From the west the wind blows fiercely towards you out of the blue sky. Under the blue space is a flattened dome of earth-cloud clinging to, and altogether masking the form of, the mountain, known as the ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... to splice, a block to change, a wheel to oil, an old rusted anchor to disengage from the cable, which brought it up—these have been our only obstructions. Sixty, seventy, eighty, a hundred, a hundred and twenty revolutions at last my little engine tears away. The even black rope comes straight out of the blue, heaving water, passes slowly round an open-hearted, good-tempered-looking pulley, five feet in diameter, aft past a vicious nipper, to bring all up should anything go wrong, through a gentle guide on ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... care about seeing the house. She was satisfied with seeing the island. There it lay, long and green, raised high out of the blue sea like a wall, with the water washing its stony shore. There seemed to be a good many trees and bushes on top, and altogether she thought it a beautiful place, and one where a little girl ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... for your sake," I said, avoiding her gaze as the far-off whistle of the north-bound express came floating out of the blue distance. ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... the skin of the prickly-pear—the sharp points bristling terror to invaders. On his left arm he carried his trusty shield, made of the back of the golden beetle, and his right hand grasped his sharp blade, fashioned out of the blue sword-grass. ...
— The Fairy Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... wide plain of sand, like Egypt, so that ever and anon I looked around me to see if nowhere, from the base of the horizon, the pyramids cut their triangle out of the blue night of heaven; but I saw none. The stars came down and sparkled on the dry sands, and all was waste, and wide desolation. The air also was still as the air of a walled-up tomb, where there are but dry bones, and not even the wind of an evil vapour ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... did Siegfried guide the flying vessel as it leaped from wave to wave, and sent the white foam dashing to left and right like flakes of snow. And late on the morrow he came to a rock-bound coast, where steep cliffs and white mountain-peaks rose up, as it were, straight out of the blue sea. Having found a safe and narrow inlet, he moored his little bark; and, keeping the Tarnkappe well wrapped around him, he stepped ashore. Briskly he walked along the rough shore, and through a dark mountain-pass, until he ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... he made his painful journeys through the length and breadth of the land, and still, as new editions were called forth, the book grew from octavo into folio. Suddenly, about twelve years after its first unchallenged appearance, there was issued, like a bolt out of the blue, a very nasty pamphlet, called Discovery of certain Errors Published in the much-commended Britannia, which created a fine storm in the antiquarian teapot. This attack was the work of a man who would otherwise be ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... no trace of the means by which all this was effected is left. The rock stands forth in its white and rugged mystery, as if its peak had been born out of the blue sky. The strength that raised it, and the sea that wrought upon it, have passed away, and left no sign; and we have no words wherein to describe their departure, no thoughts to form about their action, than those of the perpetual ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... him to get out of bed, and we put his helmet and sword-belt on for him, and we sung him bits out of the Blue Fairy Book—the cram-book on Army organisation. Oh yes, and then we asked him to drink old Clausewitz's health, as a brother-tactician, in milk-punch and Worcester sauce, and so on. We had to help him a little there. He bites. There wasn't much else that time; but, you ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... From out of the blue ether and the whimsical generosity of Fate, meanwhile, had come an assistant for Packard who gave new zest to his adventure. His name was Johnny O'Hara, and Packard always insisted that he came as a ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... and much more; the task occupied so much of her time that she forgot to go asleep that night, and she saw the morning star shine out of the blue haze beyond the city, and it belonged to a dawn with a meaning entirely its own. Never before or after was a daybreak so beautiful. The sun wheeled royally into view through the atmosphere of her ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... soft white clouds heard them, And stepped from out of the blue; And each laid a little child softly ...
— Marigold Garden • Kate Greenaway
... valley she came, for far and far below in the dreaming meadows Pleaded ever the Voice of voices, calling his love by her golden name; So she arose from her home in the hills, and down through the blossoms that danced with their shadows, Out of the blue of the dreaming distance, down to the heart of her lover ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... for several years, but only as a commonplace girl who happened to be musical. He could still remember his depression that afternoon at Rome, when she and her terrible cousin fell on him out of the blue, and demanded to be taken to St. Peter's. That day she had seemed a typical tourist—shrill, crude, and gaunt with travel. But Italy worked some marvel in her. It gave her light, and—which he held more precious—it gave her shadow. Soon he detected in her a wonderful reticence. She ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... yet in her mind she looked out of the window in front of her, and saw his slim, supple figure, clad in a white sweater, shoot swiftly down a snow-draped slope ahead of her, like a meteor flashing earthwards out of the blue. ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... honestly protest that nothing in my life ever came more "out of the blue" than my marriage; and beyond that I am increasingly certain each day that it did come out of that blue ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... girl. It did not seem strange to her that the love of the lower creation should be strong in this man, who had no hesitation in admitting that the game laws were no restraint to him. When these Lesser Brethren, worn with their journey, sailed down out of the blue heavens, he believed in ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... fore yard-arm under water, and drifted off bodily to leeward. All this time there was not a cloud to be seen in the sky, day or night; no, not so large as a man's hand. Every morning the sun rose cloudless from the sea, and set again at night in the sea in a flood of light. The stars, too, came out of the blue one after another, night after night, unobscured, and twinkled as clear as on a still frosty night at home, until the day came upon them. All this time the sea was rolling in immense surges, white with foam, as far as the eye could reach, on every side; ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... heaven-sent moment for the tool-manufacturers. They were staggering under the depression of 1907, and many were tottering toward failure. Here came, almost out of the blue sky, a condition that at once taxed their brains, their resource, and their energy, and at the same time rescued ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... and tall, graceful spire do justice to its magnificent site. From the eminence occupied by the church the Irish Sea is plainly visible, and in the distance the almost tropical Isle of Man rises abruptly out of the blue waters. The monotony of our previous day's travel was forgotten in lively anticipation as we proceeded at what seemed a snail's pace over the fine road leading from Penrith to Carlisle. We had been warned at Penrith, not against the ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... very pleased. The arrangement of the flowers bore witness to fairer fingers than the boy's own in the disposition of the rings of colour, red campion and anemone, cowslip and speedwell, primroses and wood-hyacinths; and rising out of the blue was a branch bearing thick white blossom, so thick, and of so pure a whiteness, that Miss Middleton, while praising Crossjay for soliciting the aid of Miss Dale, was at a loss to name ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the first delights of early love; of wanderings together on the sunny fresh hilltops, and of the sweet pictures and visions that arise out of the blue and misty distance. The Child understood not rightly what he heard, and fain would he have understood, for he thought that even in such visions must be wondrous delight. He gazed aloft after the unwearied bird, but she had disappeared ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... for a single moment, like a bird of prey pausing in mid circle to note the position of the field mouse before it closes wings and bolts down out of the blue, Drew sat his horse motionless and stared down into the valleys below until he noted the exact location of his house—the lake glittered back and up to him in the slant light of the late afternoon. The bay, such was the violence of its panting, ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... amiss, though whether her faculty was purely intuitional or merely the delicate functioning of a mental process she was unable to say, any more than a person suffering from "cat-fear" can tell how he detects the presence of the hidden cat, whether the warning comes out of the blue, or is the result of finely ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... across the lane. The driver fought for control as it swerved and screeched on its tilting frame. He brought it to a halt amid a haze of blue smoke from burning brakes and bent metal. The white over green Travelaire never slowed, fighting its way out of the blue into the ultra-high yellow and lighter traffic. Ben kept Beulah ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... preceding days were to be spent at the Tower; and on the 19th of May, she was conducted thither in state by the lord mayor and the city companies, with one of those splendid exhibitions upon the water which in the days when the silver Thames deserved its name, and the sun could shine down upon it out of the blue summer sky, were spectacles scarcely rivalled in gorgeousness by the world-famous wedding of the Adriatic. The river was crowded with boats, the banks and the ships in the pool swarmed with people; and fifty great barges formed the procession, all blazing ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... the train at Preston, the station nearest the ranch, and took a hired team up the road along Bear Creek Gorge. They debouched out of the Blue Mountains into the valley of the ranch in the early evening, and Vance found himself looking with new eyes on the little kingdom. He felt the happiness, indeed, of one who has lost a great prize and then put himself in a fair way of ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... herself, had passed a sad and lonely evening; seated by a casement which looked into the garden, she had pensively watched star after star sparkle out of the blue depths of the sky, and was indulging a crowd of anxious thoughts about her lover, until the rising tears began to flow. She was suddenly alarmed by the sound of voices, that seemed to come from a distant part of the mansion. There was, not long after, a noise of several persons descending the ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... sole reliance of the force, as the Obozerskaya station went out of order for a time, and the various points, Onega, Seletskoe and Archangel were kept in communication by this small unit at Verst 455. "H" Company men will recall that out of the blue sky from the east one day came a message from Major Nichols asking if their gallant leader, Phillips, had any show of recovering from the Bolo bullet in his lung. The message sent ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... impregnable strength and engineering ability, and, owing to its wonderful provision of underground granaries, etc., could stand a siege for years. These great mathematical, dazzling granite walls, bristling with big guns, and rising defiantly and almost abruptly out of the blue sea, form a proud sight to Englishmen when approached from seaward. And, then, glancing at its geographical position, almost in the centre of the Mediterranean, in proximity to three Continents, and taking into consideration that other great stronghold (the door to the Mediterranean, of which Englishmen ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux |
