"Blurred" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The wind went through me, and I expected to be disrobed by it any minute. I was afraid I couldn't hold any clothes on. Presently all I could see was a flashing gray wall with a white line in the middle. Then my eyes blurred. My face burned. My ears grew full of a hundred thousand howling devils. I was about ready to die when the car stopped. I looked and looked, and when I could see, there ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... Ilse adieu, and went out without turning her head—perhaps because her brown eyes had suddenly blurred with tears. ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... with relief across the valley. Heat waves blurred the hollow and pushed Sour Creek away until it seemed a river of mist—yellow mist. He raised his attention out of that sweltering hollow to the cool, blue, mighty ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... their members. How, then, is one to look forward with comfort to the establishment of a Labour Government? It will take a readier speech than even Mr. Webb's, a more confident than even Mr. Smillie's to illuminate this smoke-blurred scene whereon we make out every trade union preying upon Mr. George's vitals (which are, unfortunately, for the moment our own vitals), and with a success so disastrously easy as to make any prospects of a return to sane, honest, dignified or just government almost hopeless! Mr. George is destroying ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... bursting shells. I stood on the slag heap, staring at this curtain of smoke, hour after hour, dazed by the tumult of noise and by that impenetrable veil which hid all human drama. There was no movement of men to be seen, no slaughter, no heroic episode—only through rifts in the smoke the blurred edges of slag heaps and pit-heads, and smoking ruins. German trenches were being battered in, German dugouts made into the tombs of living men, German bodies tossed up with earth and stones—all that was ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... As the mind of Tsiskwa dwelt on the various subtleties of the diplomatic attitude of the Mengwe toward the Lenape, its craft so appealed to him that his lips curved with relish; a smile irradiated his blurred eyes and intensified his wrinkles; his cough, shaking the folds of his outer fur garments above his wasted chest, mingled with his gay chuckle of merriment, as young as a boy's, while he cried, "Iroquois! Iroquois!"—the characteristic exclamation of the Mengwe confederation, whence ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... liquid clearness, or that which suggests it; as, limpid streams. That which is distinct is well defined, especially in outline, each part or object standing or seeming apart from any other, not confused, indefinite, or blurred; distinct enunciation enables the hearer to catch every word or vocal sound without perplexity or confusion; a distinct statement is free from indefiniteness or ambiguity; a distinct apprehension of ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... up the real estate dealer's former letter as soon as he reached his office next morning. The printed letter-head, somewhat blurred, because too much ink had ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... seems, remained on the road looking down at her. He did not offer to approach her, neither did he make any other movement or gesture. Flora de Barral told me all this. She could see him through her tears, blurred to a mere shadow on the white road, and then again becoming more distinct, but always absolutely still and as if lost in thought before a strange phenomenon which demanded the ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... hesitation once more our rifles rang out in a well-knit volley. That caused a terrible commotion, for cavalry are an easy mark. Ponies broke away and galloped frantically into side streets; there was a waving and a mix-up which blurred everything, and yet before we had time to realise it, bullets were hissing all round us and kicking up little spurts of dust a few inches from our bodies; a resolute commander was in front of us. This firing became so violent that we were driven to take shelter, and ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... smiled lopsidedly, the left side of his face refusing to make the effort. "Arright," he said, in a low, blurred voice. "Wha' happen', Frang?" ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... autumn held an episode so deeply graven in my memory that time has not blurred a dine of it. Jane, our faithful maid of all work, who went with us to our Western home, had little time to play the governess. Household duties claimed her every waking hour, as mother was delicate, and the family a large one; so Turk officiated as both guardian and playmate ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... society for any opinion of her own actions, to continue in that hateful excitement; he sees men and women all round him letting their love and their desire trickle through their fingers; he sees Semenoff die, and death also in that atmosphere is blurred and meaningless. Men and women plunge into horrible relationships and constantly excuse themselves. They seek to propitiate society by labouring to give permanence to fleeting pleasures, the accidents of passion and propinquity. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... roar of the exhaust that told the boys that all the cylinders were getting down to work. Blue flames and smoke belched out of the vents and the mechanics sprang back, as the propellers whirled round at a pace that made them seem blurred shadows. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... moment on the evening impressed itself on Claire in a series of blurred hectic pictures.... She knew that Stillman was leading her toward the piano, but the living-room and its toned lights gave her a curious sense of unreality. She seated herself before the white keyboard and folded her hands with desperate resignation while she ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... secured blurred the main issue, have we lost sight of the goal? The objective of the New Zealand Labour Party to-day is the 'securing to all of the full value of their labour power by the gradual public ownership of all the means of production, ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... it, Miss Satterly had somehow managed to worm from him a promise, and after that nothing mattered. The Wax-works, the tree, the whole entertainment dissolved into a blurred background, against which he was to stand with Annie Pilgreen, for the amusement of his neighbors, who would stamp their feet and shout derisive things at him. Very likely he would be subjected to the agony of an encore, ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... breezy day, when the sun scorches the sand and the wind continuously sweeps off the dry surface, and your ears detect the musical sound accompanying the process—vague as the visible part of it is blurred and misty—then it is that you are made aware of the agencies by which time creates geographical differences. Precipitated at the apex of the spit, the sand as it sinks tints the verge of the sea, while the lighter spoil, leaves and wisps of seaweed, trip off on independent voyage. ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... forehead—so calm, so unclouded in society—told of gnawing cares. Then she stole a look at her husband, as he reclined in his arm-chair, his head lying back against the cushions in listless repose, his eyes looking vacantly at the window, whence he could see only the rain-blurred fronts of opposite houses, blank, dull windows, grey slated ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the second year of their marriage. He remembered now her diary had given an account of it when the painter came over from the Continent to execute the commission. He tried to recall her appearance the day of the assault. The impression was too blurred by excitement to have much meaning. He wondered if she really showed the ten years added to her age. At least he knew that she had not been happy. There was some consolation in that. Her ceaseless efforts to win back his friendship had left no room for doubt. He sank deep ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... morality with equal impunity, and the utmost rigor of punishment had little terror for those whose hardships could scarcely be artificially worsened. The stagger of despair, the stricken, helpless aspect of such people, their gaunt faces and blurred eyes might conceivably be their stock-in-trade, the keys wherewith they unlocked hearts and purses and area-doors. It must be so when the sun was shining and birds were singing across fields not immeasurably distant, and children in walled ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... I cannot tell you. Morphia wipes out the memory as surely as drink. I only know that I was in torment. Faces, familiar and strange faces, some compassionate, some indignant, some horror-struck, come back to me sometimes, blurred as by smoke, but I see nothing clearly. I dimly remember fragments of appeals that were made to me, fragments of divine music in cathedrals where I sobbed my heart out. Broken, splintered, devastating memories of promises made in bitter tears, and endless ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... portfolio 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 song it ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd
... possible presence of anaesthesia during eye-movement is given by a very simple observation. All near objects seen from a fairly rapidly moving car appear fused. No further suggestion of their various contour is distinguishable than blurred streaks of color arranged parallel, in a hazy stream which flows rapidly past toward the rear of the train. Whereas if the eye is kept constantly moving from object to object scarcely a suggestion of this blurred appearance can be detected. The phenomenon is striking, since, ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... the earth was drenched with starlight. Down one of the alleys, which widened as it receded, he could see a part of the lamplit terrace where a sentry silently paced, and beyond that a corner of the town with interlacing street-lights. But all around him the young trees stood mystically blurred in the dim shine; and in the stock-still quietness the upleaping god ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that crisis there would very likely come relenting, and tenderness, and comparative calm. She went out to make some tea, and when she returned with the tray in her hands, Janet had dried her eyes and now turned them towards her mother with a faint attempt to smile; but the poor face, in its sad blurred beauty, ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... the creature. When he first opened his eyes, there was a new look in them for a moment, which struck home to Trottle's memory as quick and as clear as a flash of light. The old maudlin sleepy expression came back again in another instant, and blurred out all further signs and tokens of the past. But Trottle had seen enough in the moment before it came; and he troubled Benjamin's face with no ...
— A House to Let • Charles Dickens
... They can't do without me! If any son-of-a-gun here thinks he knows how to break a colt," he shouted, looking around with the irrelevant fierceness of drink—and then his challenge ebbed vacantly in laughter as the subject blurred in his mind. "You're not drinking, ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... lie Like brides in the fond caress Of the warm sunshine and the tender sky— Where the ocean, passionless And tranquil, lies like a child whose eyes Are blurred with drowsiness. ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... of an hour beginning with the tear-blurred moment when Mary caught sight of her father looking for her and Rush down the railway station platform, during which the whole fabric of misgivings about her home-coming dissolved as dreams do when one wakes. It had not been ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... conduct is paramount; but he who lacks intellectual culture, whatever else he may be, is narrow, awkward, unintelligent. The mirror of his soul is dim, the motions of his spirit are sluggish, and the divine image which is himself is blurred. ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... of the brain of the Fenachrone became blurred and meaningless and the flow of knowledge ceased—the prisoner had regained consciousness and was trying with all his gigantic strength to break from those intangible bonds that held him. So powerful were the forces upon him, however, that only a few twitching muscles gave evidence that he was ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... incident in the beautiful story he identified on the blurred stone, puzzled here and there by the unfamiliar Greek convention, but delighted as a child at each new trove. Where the sequence failed, as in the Annunciation, the Curator supplied it from his mound of books—French and ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... violated. A fearful consciousness of being guilty of uttering lies would persist, in spite of efforts to subdue reason. Language would break in the attempt to find words for the inexpressible, the message would be blurred and incoherent. The judge might pull himself together, feeling that the turbulent thought-waves of contending counsel form a much safer ground on which to pronounce truth than the fourth-dimensional hurricane with which he had just battled. And the audience ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... standing at the top of the hill. His white locks were uncovered, and he was in his shirt-sleeves. Baby Jot, as usual, held fast by his shaking hand, for they loved each other, these two. The cruel stroke of the sun that had blurred the old man's brain had spared a blessed something in him that won the healing ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was cool and calm, soft and blurred with the smoke of their cigarettes. Frances Carr left them to talk, telling them not to be late. When she had gone, Pamela said "I thought you were still ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... figure in the general blankness, with his high boots and oilskins, smoking a short clay pipe by the door of the engine-room; and further out, under the dripping dome of an umbrella, sat Oswyn in a great pea-jacket, smoking, painting the mist, the rain, the white river with its few blurred barges and its background of dreary warehouses, in a supreme disregard of the ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... Martin and three or four more pressed the throng back. The good people cheered again as the machine ran forward and sailed above them, and Smith, as he looked down upon the sea of faces lit up by the flaring torches until it became a blurred spot of light, felt cheered and encouraged, and set his face hopefully towards the ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... interest he kept at his task. "The grandeur of these forces and their glorious results," he once wrote, "overpower me and inhabit my whole being. Waking or sleeping, I have no rest. In dreams I read blurred sheets of glacial writing, or follow lines of cleavage, or struggle with the difficulties of some ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... the little boat, and it did something more—it revealed a thickening of the atmosphere. They were running into a sea fog, one of those thin white fogs that come down in the Mediterranean on windless days. The blinding glare of the searchlight blurred. ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... stirring of surprise that she heard no flop such as must attend the violent falling of so fat a body. But the next instant, realizing the purpose of his absurd posture, she shrank back with a faint gasp, and her face was mercifully blurred to his sight once more amid the shadows of her chair. Thus was he spared the look of utter loathing, of unconquerable, irrepressible disgust that ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... lesson was recited in its season, and recited well; but tears blurred many a page, and at recess not a few went to be alone with God. At eleven o'clock, Mr. Perkins came in as usual to sing with them, "Bartimeus" was the first hymn. All began it; but some voices faltered on the first stanza, more on the second, and soon the ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... should satisfy 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 ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... end of the evening Aurelle had but a blurred remembrance. Towards one o'clock in the morning he found himself squatting on the floor drinking stout beside a little major, who was explaining to him that he had never met more respectable women than ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... track 'em, since we can't hear 'em," said Jan, fumbling in his pockets. He struck a light, and held the match to the ground. The rain had been heavier here, and all foot and horse tracks made previous to the storm had been abraded and blurred by the drops, and they were now so many little scoops of water, which reflected the flame of the match like eyes. One set of tracks was fresh and had no water in them; one pair of ruts was also empty, and not small canals, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... house with the help of the light from a solitary candle hanging in a sconce upon the wall, it had once been a handsome building. Now, however, it had fallen sadly to decay. The ceiling of the hall had at one time been richly painted, but now only blurred traces of the design remained. Crossing the hall, my guide opened a door at the further end. In obedience to a request from Hayle, I entered this room, to find myself standing in a fine apartment, ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... itself might 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 ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... was Failure." Under the third picture the artist wrote, "These Loved God Best and Their Neighbors as Themselves;" and the woman took the pencil from his hand and wrote, "Old Age is Very Beautiful—More Beautiful Than Youth," and a tear fell and blotted some of the words, as a drop of rain makes a blurred spot on a dusty pane. And the lover said, "Serving others is better than serving ourselves;" and the girl's sweet voice answering, like an echo, "Serving others is better ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... cave stretched. He came to a sharp turn in the cave, with the failing lamplight now behind him, so that his shadow confronted Jurgen, blurred but unarguable. It was the proper shadow of a commonplace and elderly pawnbroker, and ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... houses, each standing in its own grounds. In the light of a street lamp we read "Laburnum Villa" upon the gate-post of one of them. The occupants had evidently retired to rest, for all was dark save for a fanlight over the hall door, which shed a single blurred circle on to the garden path. The wooden fence which separated the grounds from the road threw a dense black shadow upon the inner side, and here it was that ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... confusion of the first shock. Still there is a slight interval; and when Othello reappears we see at a glance that he is a changed man. He is physically exhausted, and his mind is dazed.[100] He sees everything blurred through a mist of blood and tears. He has actually forgotten the incident of the handkerchief, and has to be reminded of it. When Iago, perceiving that he can now risk almost any lie, tells him that ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... laughing. He was whirled this way and that, the men from whom he had struck himself free recovered themselves, closed in upon him. A blow between the eyes half stunned him, another on his mouth silenced his laughter. The room was getting blurred. He was forced back against the bar, fighting, but not effectively. The snarling laughter was not his now, but ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... 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 ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... men, we may be sure, with thick, hasty speech, and hot, impatient temper, and it is easy, I think, even at this late date, to distinguish Shakespeare's touches on the traditional portrait. It is for the reader to say whether Shakespeare blurred the picture, or ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... are more suggestive than the old churchyards all blurred and dim with London smoke, but yet in which a few trees yearly put forth green leaves of little promise, and a choir of sooty sparrows chirp around the queer old steeples or perch impudently upon the leaden ornaments which adorn the sacred porch. In ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... a wave-worn voyager's sensations when, a couple of hours later, he demands permission to get out of his delicious little white bed that he may have the pleasure of getting into it again. The evening is cold and raw and the new picture is all blurred and soft and indistinct, and nothing seems plain except the kindly grace of our welcome and the never-before-sufficiently-appreciated ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... sustained and nourished her, as it nourished poor, crippled Tucker on his old pine bench. The eye of the spirit was theirs—this Christopher had learned at last; and he had learned, also, that for him there still remained only the weak, blurred ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... to the hospital, but on the way along the Quai Duguay-Trouin—I noticed it written up—I became again confused. My vision was not as it should have been, and my memory seemed blurred, even of the happenings of the ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... up and waved a handkerchief. No figure rose in response, but as if in answer, they heard a distant splashing in the water, and then, following so quickly that it blurred the impression of the first stealthy sound, came the sharp explosion of a shot. Instantly the slumberous silence of the tropical night was shattered by a savage confusion of noises. Other shots were fired, a great bell began to clang, another boomed ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... children of the country, that is, in drinking, eating, and sleeping: in eating, sleeping, and drinking: and in sleeping, drinking, and eating. Still he wallowed and rolled up and down himself in the mire and dirt—he blurred and sullied his nose with filth—he blotted and smutched his face with any kind of scurvy stuff—he trod down his shoes in the heel—at the flies he did oftentimes yawn, and ran very heartily after the butterflies, the empire whereof belonged to his father. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... conceivable (even though it seem a wilfully grotesque) explanation of my failure. What if the human derelicts I had so far chosen for my experiments had no souls to photograph? Sodden with drink, debauched, degraded, and spiritually blurred or blunted to the last degree, these after all were the least likely subjects to yield results to the spirit photographer. I should have chosen saints instead of sinners such as these, entities in ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... And heaping blossom stirred By a joy-swift bird. White mists are blinding me, White mist of hedgerow, white mist of wings. The bird's flight flings Deep carpetings Over the wrack Of my life's track. Down here the hawthorn.... The air of coloured years is blurred By the Spring, by a bird. White mists are blinding me, White mists on the years to be. I cannot ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... until it sounded within a few feet of the unconscious sleeper. Then a black bulk slowly lifted from the ground, and gradually assumed the proportions of a man standing motionless. Of a sudden this figure, whose blurred outlines were barely discernible, made a quick movement, and the hammock of the young Spaniard was cut in twain by the sweeping ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... sinking; the room was blurred; the excruciating agony of tortured nerves melted into a lethargy that swept through him. Dimly he sensed that the monstrous, quivering, bell-topped thing was still launching its devastating rain of vibrations; they were above ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... figure—Gorley's—spinning on a rope. But even upon that picture Drake's face obtruded. She thrust out her hands to keep it off, as though it was living and pressing in upon her; for a moment she tried to conjure up Gorley's face, but it was blurred—only his form she could see spinning on a rope, and Drake beneath it, his features clear like an intaglio and firm-set with that same sense of duty which had forced him sternly to recount to her the truth that afternoon. She ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... shelter at the entrance of the promenade. She could taste it on her lips, the wet drops clung to her eyelashes. Lillie, who had just arrived to take her place, looked all out of curl like a moulting bird, but both of them were spiritualized by the grey mist which blurred their outlines and through which their lips and eyes showed fresh ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... curtain; viewless, sightless; inconspicuous, unconspicuous^; unseen &c (see) &c 441; covert &c (latent) 526; eclipsed, under an eclipse. dim &c (faint) 422; mysterious, dark, obscure, confused; indistinct, indistinguishable; shadowy, indefinite, undefined; ill- defined, ill-marked; blurred, fuzzy, out of focus; misty &c (opaque) 426; delitescent^. hidden, obscured, covered, veiled (concealed) 528. Phr. full many a flower is ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of drifting rain And a blurred white lamp o'erhead, That shines as my love will shine again In the ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... almost a year after her return to Washington, Josephine St. Auban sat in her apartments, looking at a long document inscribed in a fine, foreign hand. It was the report of the agent of her estates in Prance and Hungary. As she read it the lines blurred before her eyes. It demanded an effort even of her superb courage fairly to face and meet the meaning. In fact, it was this: The revolution of Louis Napoleon of 1851 had resulted in the confiscation of many estates in France, all her own included. As though by concert among the monarchies of ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... the adventure by the shore had grown perhaps a little blurred in some of its details. I wished I could see that curved thing rising against the night sky a trifle more distinctly in my mind's eye; so that I could take my oath in court it was a weapon. Still, I ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... of my wrath had blurred his outline and make-up before; now I got a closer, although a side, view of his person. He was a short man, much thicker at the middle than he was at either end—a defect all the more apparent by reason of a long-tailed, high-waisted, unbuttonable black coat which, while ...
— Forty Minutes Late - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... business is made; it choked the keen money-getting instinct which would have led him to study the differences between the Paris trade and the business of a provincial printing-house. The shades of opinion so sharply defined in the country are blurred and lost in the great currents of Parisian business life. Cointet Brothers set themselves deliberately to assimilate all shades of monarchical opinion. They let every one know that they fasted of a Friday and kept Lent; they ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... Suddenly, blurred and crouching figures appeared out of the night. They moved quickly and silently. One of them nearly trod upon his hand, but he was too dazed to think of committing himself to either speech ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... weeping and wailing of a nation! So the melody sinks slowly, to die away in one long-drawn, minor note, and Donald is looking across at me with his grave smile, and I will admit both his face and figure are sadly blurred. ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... cool night air, wistful with the fragrance of unseen flowers. His eyes were dazed for the moment by the sudden change of light. He made out the blurred silhouette of the taxi and faltered, thinking he might have a chance to hire it; then he saw that its shadowy occupants were climbing back into its deeper darkness. It seemed that Sir Tobias had been right; it had stopped at the ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... on a wave, With feathers slanted and sustaining. Higher, Until the earth turns beneath it; Poised and swinging, With all the garden flowing beneath it, Scarlet, and blue, and purple, and white— Blurred colour reflections in rippled water— Changing—streaming— For the moment that Stella takes to lift her arm. Then the shuttlecock relinquishes, Bows, Descends; And the sharp blue spears of the ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... fields was like a feeble water-colour drawing half sponged out. The mist was darkening, the rain was thickening, the trees were dotted about like spots of faint shadow, the division-lines which mapped out the fields were all getting blurred together, and the lonely farm-house where the dog-cart had been left, loomed spectral in the grey light like the last human dwelling at the end of the habitable world. Was this a sight worth climbing to ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... speaking, for the first time, a little constrainedly on his side. "It is only doing me justice to say that." He stopped and began drawing lines absently with his finger on the blurred surface of the window-pane. "You're not like other people, Midwinter," he resumed, suddenly, with an effort; "and I should have liked you to have heard the particulars ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... The words blurred before Judith's eyes. She sunk her head upon her knees. "Possess my heart in patience—Possess my heart in patience—Oh, God, I am not old enough yet to ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... into the reason for our curious reluctance to use locutions involving the word "whom" particularly in its interrogative sense. The only distinctively objective forms which we still possess in English are me, him, her (a little blurred because of its identity with the possessive her), us, them, and whom. In all other cases the objective has come to be identical with the subjective—that is, in outer form, for we are not now taking account of position in the sentence. ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... was an interval of silence, during which the candles seemed to move strangely from side to side, and the dark face beyond was blurred and indistinct; all save the eyes, which, like the lidless orbs of a snake, held and fascinated her. Vaguely she comprehended the peril of a confused mind, and strove to draw upon that secret inward strength ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... point 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
... the Venters of old. As he came up the steps she felt herself pointing to the pack, and heard herself speaking words that were meaningless to her. He said good-by; he kissed her, released her, and turned away. His tall figure blurred in her sight, grew dim through dark, streaked vision, and then ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... ironwork of the railway bridge—2,000 yards, at least, from the trenches—the surface of the ground was blurred and dusty. Across the bridge the Infantry were still moving, but no longer slowly—they were running for their lives. Man after man emerged from the sheltered railroad, which ran like a covered way across the enemy's front, into the open and the driving hail ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... rose from the garden chair, slowly, dragging himself with an invalid air. His eyes stared, groping, blurred films that trembled between the pouch and droop of the lids; long cheeks, deep grooved, dropped to the infirm mouth that sagged under the limp mustache. ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... and swelled as I felt myself blessed by the privilege of being in his sublime presence. Tears blurred my eager sight when Yoganandaji dropped to his knees, and with bowed head offered his soul's gratitude and greeting, touching with his hand his guru's feet and then, in humble obeisance, his own head. He rose then ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... quick as light. Before she had time to seek an answer for her question the man—who was young, or youngish, not more than thirty-three or four—had bent over her as if greeting a friend, and had begun to speak in a low voice blurred by haste ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... became blurred and his heart grew cold as he thought of what might have happened to her. A vision of the girl swept between him and Wabi's face, in which the glow of life was growing warmer and warmer, a vision of the little half-Indian maiden as he had first seen her, when she came out to meet them ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... the scattered sheep might not be found, And long and loud that gentle maid did weep, Till in her blurred sight the hills went round, And, circling far, field, wood, and stream did sweep; And on the ground the miserable Bopeep Fell and forgot her troubles ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... and on two of them a closely written letter had been blotted several times, showing that there had been several sheets of the letter. Muller held it up to the looking-glass, but the repeated blotting had blurred the writing to such an extent that it was impossible to decipher any but a few disconnected words, which gave no clue. On a page further along on the blotter, however, he saw what appeared to be the impression of an address. He held it up to the glass ...
— The Case of the Registered Letter • Augusta Groner
... old Friend as well as a very kind and constant one; and so I don't like not to send you what I have sent others.—The Artist who took me, took (as he always does) three several Views of one's Face: but the third View (looking full-faced) got blurred by my blinking at the Light: so only these two were reproduced—I shouldn't know that either was meant for [me]: nor, I think, would any one else, if not told: but the Truth- telling Sun somehow did them; and as he acted so handsomely by ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... country beckoned, and before committing himself to it, he turned for a farewell look at Warwick. The city stood upon the high river wall, roof above roof shimmering in the hazy light, every line of chimney, spire, and tower softened by the distance, like a blurred etching against a pale ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... and two public-houses in quest of liver. At the eighth venture they were successful. At the sign of The Crooked Billet liver and bacon was the dish of the day. So much a blurred menu was proclaiming from its enormous brass frame. Before the two were half-way upstairs, the terrier's excitement ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... had not gone far before he saw some one else coming, a strange, nondescript figure, with outlines paled and blurred in the moonlight, looking as if it bore its own gigantic and heavy head before it in outstretched arms. Soon he saw it was his uncle Ozias Lamb, laden with bundles of shoes about his shoulders, bending forward ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... grass and bush and hedge, Reddening the road and deepening the green On wide, blurred lawn, and in close-tangled sedge; Veiling in gray the landscape stretched between These low broad meadows and the pale hills seen But dimly ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... eyes upon him, Kenny felt that he could not be expected to read each word of the letter. He never did that anyhow. He blurred through now with amazing speed, catching enough to gratify and upset him. The letter, reminiscent of his penitential quest for Brian, roused voices that he did not want to hear. Nor did he hear them for long. Joan was holding out the clipping, ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... distinguish their human from their totemic nature; in speaking, for example, of a man of the kangaroo totem they seem unable to discriminate sharply between the man and the animal: perhaps we may say that what is before their mind is a blurred image, a sort of composite photograph, of a man and a kangaroo in one: the man is semi-bestial, the kangaroo is semi-human. And similarly with their ancestors of all other totems: if the particular ancestors, for example, had the bean-tree ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... which grotesque faces look down, while shapes of fantastic beasts climb up the angles, animated by that great thought of Art, which in those old days gave life to inanimate nature. These relics, resisting change, present to the eye of painters those dusky tones and half-blurred features in which ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... were hardly to be recognised, so blurred and swollen with crying was the poor little face. But still there was no confession. "I didn't touch Towzer's goodies," she persisted over and over again. Eleanor's heart ached, but ...
— A Christmas Posy • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... her destiny was come, and, most extraordinary of all, in the shape of her good father's literary bureau! Yet what shock there was next day, when the hero of her dreams came to her with his ordinary pale-gray eyes, blurred ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... at his kindness in coming. He looked considerably older than his age; his hair had grown thin and grey about his temples, and the sharp birdlike outline of his face and features seemed blurred and indeterminate. His creed too, and his whole manner of looking at things of faith, seemed to have undergone a similar process. The two had ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... toyed with. That it was good sport, high-spiced excitment, and occupation for her restless, active mind, was all she considered. As she would never be neutral in her moral character, so she was one who would do much of either harm or good. Familiarity with the insincerities of fashionable life had blurred her sense of truthfulness in little things, and in matters of policy she could hide her meaning or express another as well as ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... brain picture of a great, high-walled yard with a monster in it of the kind he had caught a close-range glimpse a short while before. Also, he saw a blurred, tiny figure, running from wall to wall, that was Greca's imagining of Brand and his efforts to escape ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... culture (one each individual must choose by action to join), one should not be surprised that the line between description and influence can become more than a little blurred. Earlier versions of the Jargon File have played a central role in spreading hacker language and the culture that goes with it to successively larger populations, and we hope and expect that this one will ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... blind, and saw with a dull acquiescence that the brightness of the May had fled. The wind was high—he heard it fly past, moaning. In the watery sky, the round sun loomed silver-pale and blurred. To his fevered eye it looked like ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... I could refuse him after this account of his wealth, nor do I believe she would have allowed Sophie a choice, even had he been as old and ugly as he was young and handsome. I do not quite know—so many events have come to pass since then, and blurred the clearness of my recollections—if I loved him or not. He was very much devoted to me; he almost frightened me by the excess of his demonstrations of love. And he was very charming to everybody around me, ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... boy—for such he was, though in intelligence and blind devotion beyond his years—passed into the light, than on his haggard countenance was read news of disastrous import. Recent tears had blurred his sunburnt cheek, and the hand that tore the hat from his head at the unexpected sight of his mistress, partly in instinctive humility, partly, it seemed, to conceal some papers he held against his breast, twitched with ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... engrossing! Never before in all his ten years had he enjoyed anything so much. So absorbed was he that he did not note the approaching dusk, until it was quite upon him and the figures were blurred. ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... (as one feels it) rapidly up, like great prehistoric shapes of Saurians. Soon the sky only and mountains will exist. Then begins the time, before the starlit night comes to say its say, when everything grows drowsy, a little vague, and the blurred mountains go to sleep in the smoke of dusk. Then only, due west, the great Carrara peaks stand out against the sanguine sky, long pointed curves and flame-shaped sudden crests, clear and keen beyond the power of ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... And now all blurred and smirched with vice the day's sad pages end, For while the short 'large hours' toward the longer 'small hours' trend, With smiles that mock the wearer, and with words that half entreat, Delilah pleads for custom at the corner of the street — Sinking down, sinking down, Battered wreck by ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... remember another home 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 isolated cot. Some few hardy flowers had been ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... deliver it?" said Tyeglev, and moved away a few steps further. The fog blurred the outlines of ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... 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 night. Meneptah shook ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... the litters and chairmen. As souvenirs of the white-wigged personages and ladies of voluminous farthingales who had passed through this palace, there were still some classic busts on the landing places, a hand-wrought iron railing, and various huge lanterns of dull gold and blurred glass. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... pedestal and I find you have feet of clay. You have blurred the image which I formed of you. I can never think of you again without picturing you as you stood in that saloon, stammering ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... way cautiously, his figure becoming blurred as the mist wrapped him like a blanket. The darkness was gathering rapidly. From the far-off horizon clouds of lavender were melting, and the ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... palings, John reviewed the events of the last hour. The view was blurred by unshed tears. His uncle and he had driven together to the Manor. Here, the explorer had exercised his peculiar personal magnetism upon the house-master, a tall, burly man of truculent aspect and speech. John realized proudly ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... cry. Dick leaped to his feet. Then I grew dizzy, and my sight blurred. I heard hoarse shouts and saw dark forms rising as if out of the earth. All was confusion. I wanted to run, but could not get up. There was a wrestling, whirling mass ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... 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 ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... thing of which he was fully conscious, was that he had passed out of himself. The second property was that, when he would, he could conjure up any images he liked before his eyes, real [Greek: eidola], and not at all to be compared with the blurred processions of phantoms which he was wont to see when he was a child. At the time when he wrote, perhaps by reason of his busy life, he no longer saw them whensoever he would, nor so perfectly expressed, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... 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, then ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... as he saw her arranging them so light-heartedly in her pudding-dish that morning. And yet, rather than mar her pleasure, he had choked back the impulse to speak. Yes, that was like him. For a moment they blurred as she looked at them. She checked her inclination to throw them into the stove, to burn them to ashes so that they could work their evil spells no more. Later on, she would do so. But she wanted them ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... this blind and impious cult are either punished in the law-courts, or are socially ostracised. The individual thinks, even when he feels; but the same individual, when he feels with the crowd, does not reason at all. His moral sense becomes blurred. This suppression of higher humanity in crowd minds is productive of enormous strength. For the crowd mind is essentially primitive; its forces are elemental. Therefore the Nation is for ever watching to take advantage of ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... camera has a fixed focus; that is, the camera will take a legible picture only when the latent print is at the focal point, or exactly flush with the opening of the camera. The latent print must not be inside the open end of the camera, nor must it be beyond; otherwise, the picture will be blurred. ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... ideas and descriptions, whose meaning I thoroughly understood, in the clumsy form she had given them. The language of her day is a mirror whose uneven surface might easily reflect the fairest picture in blurred or distorted out lines to modern eyes. Much, indeed which most attracted me in her descriptions will have lost its peculiar charm in mine; as to whether I have always supplemented her correctly, that must remain an ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... gray, almost black, but the rain had ceased to fall, and just then above us there was a break as if the absent moon was working to cut the clouds adrift. A kind of luminous darkness closed around us. It was beautiful. The massed buildings rose a blurred outline between the river and the sky like great beasts crouching and ready to spring, while through the steel-black circlings of the bridge row after row of lights sparkled and glowed, and blurs of color, amber to warm orange, splashed upon the river. On the ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... the paper. His eyes dilated. Hastily scrawled in the lower right-hand corner of the otherwise blank leaf was a replica of the blurred sign that had caused such consternation on ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... forget the expression of surprise and pain that was in her fair young countenance. I had uttered a falsehood in her presence, and thus done violence to the good opinion she had formed of me. The beautiful ideal of her aunt, which had filled her mind, was blurred over; and her ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... so certainly," said Don Quixote, "had she not been blurred to my mind's eye by the misfortune that fell upon her a short time since, one of such a nature that I am more ready to weep over it than to describe it. For your highnesses must know that, going a few days back ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... drives silently about me, ceaselessly, drearily. And I am isolated in this tiny white, indistinguishable corner of a blurred world, surely the loneliest creature in the universe. How many thousands of years is it since I last knew the true companionship? For a long time I have been lonely, but there were people, creatures of flesh and blood. Now they are gone. Now I have not even ...
— The Coming of the Ice • G. Peyton Wertenbaker
... to carry both the metaphors together with us here. 'I have blotted out'—that is, as erasing from a book. 'I have blotted out as a cloud'—that is, the thinning away of the mist. The blurred and stained page can be cancelled. Chemicals will take the ink out. 'The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin'; and it, passed over all that foul record, makes it pure and clean. 'What I have written, I have written,' said Pilate in his obstinacy. 'What I have written, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren |
