"Blur" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... some cooking utensils he began to prepare breakfast. She watched him for an instant, and then went to the north window, rubbed a hole through the frost and tried to look out. She could not see more than a few inches into the white blur that roared against the glass, and so she turned, sought a chair near the table, and resumed watching Lawler. And her eyes filled with a warm light as they followed his movements—noting that he seemed handsomer now than he had appeared when she ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... they were silent, listening strainedly to the growing sounds of approach. There was the dull, unmistakable click of a hoof striking against a rock, the softer sound of treading on yielding soil. Then a blur of dark objects became visible, moving slowly and steadily toward ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... the crystal summit ridges delighted us as did the changing waters in the path of the steamer. Following immediately upon the transparency preserved to a depth of some eighty feet, a blur passed over the surface. This changed by imperceptible degrees to a light green. The green, again, speedily deepened, shading into a light blue; and finally, in deepest water (where the Lake is all but fathomless), ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... edge of the lumber piles Bob looked back. The noises of industry were in his ears; the blur of industry before his eyes; the clean, sweet smell of pine in his nostrils. He saw clearly the row of ships and the many-jointed serpent of boards making its way to the hold, the sailors swinging aloft; the miles of ruminating brown ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... By now the white jacket was no more than a blur moving in that deep gloom. He cried again, ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... carried the power supply on a strap over his shoulder while Rick carried the camera and its attachments. The thing was uncanny, even when its operation was understood. To the naked eye, Dismal was just a vague blur under the trees. But with the infrared searchlight on him, Rick could see him through the telescope as though it were white light. He shot a few feet of film, then took it to the photo lab. He could develop short lengths by dipping them into bottles of solution, although full lengths ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... won't come back ever again?" The meadows swam in a blur before her eyes, and she thought of the purple velvet slippers which ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... ordinary course through the post-office. Letters in the post-office are hurried quickly through the operation of stamping, so that one passing over the other while the stamping ink is still moist, will to some extent blot and blur that with which it has come in contact. He will produce some dozens taken at random, and will show that with them all such has been the case. This blotting, this smudging, is very slight, but it exists; it is always ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... up in ignorance of life, simply the exquisite prolongation of wooing. If she had looked beyond, to the vision of wider ties, it was as a traveller gazes over a land veiled in golden haze, and so far distant that the imagination delays to explore it. But now through the blur of sensations one image strangely persisted—the image of Denis's child. Had she ever before thought of their having a child? She could not remember. She was like one who wakens from a long fever: she recalled nothing of her former self or of her former feelings. She knew only that the vision ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... windy: presently it blew so strong, that he could hardly keep his legs. But, he got to an arched window in the tower, breast high, and holding tight, looked down upon the house-tops, on the smoking chimneys, on the blur and blotch of lights (towards the place where Meg was wondering where he was and calling to him perhaps), all kneaded up together in a ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... to see a great yellow garden-spider hanging head downward in the centre of his web, when we approach too closely, instead of deserting his snare, set it vibrating back and forth so rapidly that he becomes a mere blur; a more certain method of escaping the onslaught of a bird than if he ran to ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... in it must go on obtruding themselves on our senses. What we do not attend cannot be suddenly removed from the stage. Every change which is needed must be secured by our own mind. In our consciousness the attended hand must grow and the surrounding room must blur. But the stage cannot help us. The art of the theater ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... strength. Something in Joe's supreme effort and in the gloom of the Indian's eyes made Shefford curious about this stone. He bent over and grasped it as Joe had done. He braced himself and lifted with all his power, until a red blur obscured his sight and shooting stars seemed to explode in his head. But he could not even ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... another blow on the window, and something pounded and scratched against the glass. Both of them were looking this time, and again my father saw the hand without the little finger—but my mother could see only a blur ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... firelight glints in his golden hair, And his wondering eyes are fixed on my face, And he rests on the arm of my easy-chair, And the book's a blur and I lose my place: And I touch my lips to his shining head, And my voice breaks down and—the story's done. . . . Oh, children, kiss me and go to bed: Leave me to think of ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... multitudes of small soft creases. Two big red roses drooped from her bodice. She wore a garden-hat, of white straw, with a big daring rose-red bow, under which the dense meshes of her hair, warmly dark, dimly bright, shimmered in a blur of brownish gold. ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... blur the gracious moon, And blind the goodly sun: And they do well to hide their Hell, For in it things are done That Son of God nor son of ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... his eyes with a dazed expression, at first a blur of consciousness. Then gradually the recognition of himself, of his surroundings, of his life, came into them, and that self-knowledge was unmistakable. There was no doubt about the man with his twisted limbs and his twisted soul. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... observed. Whether by this apparent apathy her people hoped to lull us into a condition of equal carelessness, it is of course impossible for me to say; but, if so, they signally failed, for immediately that the barque's outline faded into an indistinct blur in the growing darkness, we went to work and shook out a reef all round, never doubting but that they were at that moment doing precisely the same thing. And our supposition was most probably correct—Ryan, indeed, who had sent for his night-glass and brought it to bear upon her, declared ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... as accurately as I can, and with no theories to blur the history. Theories are poor things at the best, and the bulk of mine have perished long ago. I love better than any theory the sound of the Gate of Ivory, turning upon its hinges, and hold that he alone who has passed the rose-strewn threshold ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... he looked long and steadily into the darkness around him. Suddenly he saw her—a pale blur ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... withstood the ravages of time wonderfully. It had encircled her like a friend, both when she was sad and when she was gay. It had been wrapped around the Baby, of whom she never thought without a pang and a blur before her eyes. It was the dearest article she had in her wardrobe, and because of that and because she had been so forgetful, she would send ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... composition and form, that constitutes her appeal and gives it the supreme heroic grace. The chariot of fire favours fusion rather than promotes analysis, and leaves much of that first June picture for me, doubtless, a great accepted blur of violet and silver. The various hours and successive aspects, the different strong passages of our reverse process, on the other hand, still figure for me even as some series of sublime landscape-frescoes— if ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... than ever at Sloane Square station. Through the still, thick blur, men groped in and out; women, very few, grasped their reticules to their bosoms and handkerchiefs to their mouths; crowned with the weird excrescence of the driver, haloed by a vague glow of lamp-light that seemed to drown in vapour ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... extreme leisure at the rails. He stuck his hands into his pockets and his head out at the very small train. His bleached blue eyes shut to slits as he watched the rear car in its smoke-blur ooze away westward among the mounded bluffs. "Lucky it's out of range," I thought. But now Scipio ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... marks blur badly and become illegible in a few months. Remember, you may be using the notebook twenty years hence, therefore make ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... Dingley Dellers, and that at the Swan—otherwise the Blue Lion—the Pickwick fellowship shared the conviviality of the rival teams, until Mr. Snodgrass's notes of the evening's transactions faded away into a blur in which there was an indistinct reference to "broiled bones" and "cold without". The stately ruins of a Benedictine Abbey, founded by Bishop Gundulf, give to the town an ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... and bright greens, yellows and pinks, positive discords and absolute antagonisms of tint side by side, yet without jarring the eye. Green all round, the trees and hedges; blue overhead, the sky; purple and gold westward, where the sun sinks. No part of this grass can be represented by a blur or broad streak of colour, for it is not made up of broad streaks. It is composed of innumerable items of grass blade and flower, each in itself coloured and different from its neighbour. Not one of these must be slurred over if you wish to get ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... Leighton, dully. Then he tossed back his head. He would not blur Lew's happy hour. He held out his hand. "I hear," he repeated, ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... fields of waving wheat And leagues of golden corn The fragrance of the wild-rose bloom And elder-flower is borne; But earth's appealing loveliness We do but half surmise, For oh, the blur of battle-fields Is ever ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... his rope, clinging desperately, trying at every solid tree to stop the career of his runaway, but in every instance being forced by the danger of jamming his hands to let go. Again he lost his derby. The landscape was a blur. Dimly he made out the howls of laughter as the outfit passed a group of rivermen. Then abruptly a ravine yawned before him, and he let go just in time to save himself a fall. The wanigan, trailing her ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... to treat you with still greater frankness. I do not approve of your preface, and I will tell you why: if your work should deserve attention, it is a blur on the very face of it. Disadvantages of education, etc., ought, in my opinion, never to be pleaded with the public in excuse for defects of any importance, because if the writer has not sufficient strength of mind to overcome the common difficulties that lie in his way, ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... I'll never see Those hills again, a blur of blue and rain Across the old Willamette. I'll not stir A pheasant as I walk, and hear it whirr Above my head, an indolent, trusting thing. When all this silly dream is finished here, The fellows will go home to where there fall Rose-petals over every street, and all The year is like a friendly ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... The frequent gloom that clouds thy noble spirit, Is born of humours natural to thy body; And, as foul vapours blur the honest sun, Hangs o'er the face of the high enterprize, That hath enrich'd thy ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... purest opposites, yet mutual, reciprocal, necessary to each other; and he is a narrow man who cannot stand in open relations with both terms, reconciling in the depths of his life, though he can never explain, the mystery of their friendship. He who will adhere only to the universal, and makes a blur of the special, is a rhapsodist; he who can apprehend only the special, being blind and callous to the universal, is a chatterer and magpie. From these opposites we never escape; Destiny and Freedom, Rest and Motion, Individual and Society, Origination ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... or four specks silhouetted against the sky—not three or four, but five—no! six—no! seven! Seven black specks which detach themselves one by one, one from another and from the vagueness beyond—experienced eyes scan the horizon with enthusiasm and excitement which threaten to blur the clearness of their vision. Anyone with an eye for sea-going craft can distinguish that topsail-schooner there, well ahead of the rest of the tiny fleet, skimming the water with swift grace, and immediately behind her the three-masted polacca—hm! ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... lanes led down, Beneath thick trees and hedgerows winding forth Like deep brook channels, deep and dark and lown: The air above was wan with misty light, 5 The dull grey south showed one vague blur of white. ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... back into the shed, covering the child up so that the drifting wet should not beat upon it. He came after me and kissed it again, saying 'Good- night, poor little innocent, good-night!' three or four times. Then he went off quickly and sprang into his saddle and in the blur of rain I saw horse and man turn away. He waved his hand once and his handsome pale face gleamed upon me like that of a ghost in the storm. 'Till to-morrow!' he called, and was gone. I took the child into the house ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... golden dust in my eyes, and I am seeing things all wrong. We have anchored for the night.... I am watching the misty green blur, which is all that is left to me of India, grow more and more indistinct as darkness falls. Soon it will ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... offered the familiar pleasantries which are the portion of that strange, sad, English creation, the barmaid. In tens of thousands of London public-houses she stands with her hand on beer-pumps, and exchanges jocose banalities with persons beyond the counter in whose dim regard she must show a mere blur of hardened loveliness against her background of bottles and decanters; but the waitress at Crosby Place is of an ideal of behavior as fine as that of any Phyllis in a White Mountain hotel; and I thought ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... slipped into a tangle of brush that marked the upper end of his patch of timber. The bare summit of the ridge stretched away in the half-light to merge in a mysterious blur with the indistinct valley of the Ten Bow. The wind was blowing gently from the ridge and the boy figured that if the wolf pack followed the summit as he hoped, they must pass within twenty yards of him. "If it don't go and cloud up before they get here I ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... foaming like a furious, rapid stream away from the stern. The houses and trees on the shore seemed to run into each other, and slide out of sight almost before the eye could rest upon them. The water alongside was merely a blue-green blur. Nitocris involuntarily held her breath as though she had been out ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... was as formalized and stylistic as an Italian garden; the only contrasts were those of one elegance with another; horses were not to be seen, except occasionally in the distance when under their riders they shot past some dark background a flitting blur of primary colours with a rumble of muffled thunder; and ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... the issues, then, before us, and I dare not blur the clear distinction which Jesus Christ draws. I listen to Him, and accept His word, and I press upon you, dear brethren, that the main thing about a road is, after all, where it leads us; and I ask you to remember that your life-path—as ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... him. He heard, too, a high-pitched cry, half of warning, half of fright; the next instant there was a mighty upheaval of snow, an explosion of feathery white, as the human projectile landed, then a blur of blue-and-white stripes as it went rolling ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... It has turned away From the vast aweful silences of Heaven (Which answer but with silence when we pray) And sought for something to assuage its grief. Some surcease and relief From sorrow, in pursuit of mortal joys. It drowned God's stillness in a sea of noise; It lost God's presence in a blur of forms; Till, bruised and bleeding with life's brutal storms, Unto immutable and speechless space The World lifts up its face, Its haggard, tear-drenched face, And cries aloud for faith's supreme reward, The promised Second Coming of ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... dark they softly stir, Till arrowy dawn the shadow-blur Dispels—God's tingling kiss of morning On oak and ...
— Song-waves • Theodore H. Rand
... dimmed with age; the countenances are scaled and marred, and nearly all expression is gone from them; the hair is a dead blur upon the wall, and there is no life in the eyes. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... faces, names, came to me through a sort of hazy blur as Hoddy and I drank something he called superbourbon—a New Texan drink that Bourbon County, Kentucky, would never have recognized. They had no corn on New Texas. This stuff was made out of something ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... Captain Coffin was waiting in his shore-boat. I listened, minute after minute, on the chance of hearing his hail. A heavy bank of cloud had overcast the moon, and the packet melted from sight in a blur of darkness. Worst of all—worse even than the sting of self-reproach—was the prospect of returning to Stimcoe's and wearing through the night, while out there in the darkness the two men would meet, and all that followed their meeting must ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... de feast? me spurne a, me kick a de feast; be garr, me tell a me do de grand grace, de favor for suppa, for dina, for eata with dee; be garrs blur, we have at home de restorative, de quintessence, de pure destill goulde, de Nector, de Ambrosia. Zacharee, make ready de fine partricke, ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... experiment. Several professional photographers, one of them a top Life photographer, said that if Hart was familiar with his camera and was familiar with panning action shots, his photos would have shown much less blur than ours. I recalled what I heard about Hart's having photographed sporting events for the Lubbock newspaper. This would have called for a ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... "there is no life in me. What I eat does not feed me; the air that enters my lungs does not refresh me; the sun feels cold; it seems to you to light that front of the house, and show you the old carvings bathed in its beams, but to me it is all a blur, a mist. If Beatrix were here, it would be dazzling. There is but one only thing left in this world that keeps its shape and color to my eyes,—this flower, this foliage," he added, drawing from his breast the withered bunch the marquise had ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... supped full with horrors. His bloody base mind is all a blur with gore. But he is resolute in evil still. At the end he sees too late that he ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... sad, somehow, and when Steve told her about Big Louie and his horses, the sadness became a lump in her throat, and a blur in her eyes which the man could not ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... looks, with the loaded coach and the cab going through the central arch, and the blur of the hurrying throng darkening the small lateral ones! A fine old structure,—always reminds a Bostonian of the old arch over which the mysterious Boston Library was said still to linger out its existence late into the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... block on 'em!" cried Bill with enthusiasm. Jim could just make out a dark blur in the fog ahead where the pursued hack was galloping to some unknown destination. At the sight all the fierce excitement of the chase came over Jim. He must not let that Mexican escape this time. It meant everything ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... not sing that without breaking down. As we recall it, we draw an inward fluttering breath, something grips our throats and makes them ache, our eyes blur, and a tear slips down upon the cheek, not of sorrow—God knows not all of sorrow—but if we had it all to live over again, how differently we—oh, well, it's too late now, ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... face appeared in a blur before him. Bates said something, but it sounded far off, and he did not catch its import. There was a long silence, and then the ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... motive, too, was plain enough in the light of the overheard conversation at the National Hotel. The men who wanted Mr. Bell's mine had waited till he had located it before striking their first blow. What would their next be? Peggy's pulses throbbed and the grove seemed to blur for an instant. But the next moment she was mistress of herself again. Clearly there was only one thing to do. Lay the whole ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... the end of the track the operator moves the front rudder, and the machine lifts from the rail like a kite supported by the pressure of the air underneath it. The ground under you is at first a perfect blur, but as you rise the objects become clearer. At a height of 100 feet you feel hardly any motion at all, except for the wind which strikes your face. If you did not take the precaution to fasten your hat before starting, you have probably ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright
... scapegoats on the altar of the fatherland. He had turned off the expected collision. Finally, the party of Order itself anxiously sought to avoid every decisive conflict with the Executive, to weaken and to blur it over. Fearing to lose its conquests over the revolution, it let its rival gather the fruits thereof. "France demands, above all things, peace," with this language had the party of Order been apostrophizing the revolution, since February; with this language did Bonaparte's ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... obscure and damp, its only light filtering through the moving curtain of green water. Black and crawling things squirmed at our feet, and darkness filled the recesses of the cavern. Malicious Gossip's body was a blur in the dimness, and her low soft voice was like an overtone of the deep organ notes of ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... years afterward that I found that out, and then—oh, then I only cried when that picture of young care-free mirth rose before me out of the blur and mists of that long-vanished time; for there had come a day between, when God's good gift of laughter had gone out from me to come again no more ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... day's thine own: Thou and thy Stars have cast me down: 870 My laurels are transplanted now, And flourish on thy conqu'ring brow: My loss of honour's great enough, Thou need'st not brand it with a scoff: Sarcasms may eclipse thine own, 875 But cannot blur my lost renown. I am not now in Fortune's power; He that is down can fall no lower. The ancient heroes were illustrious For being benign, and not blustrous, 880 Against a vanquish'd foe: their swords Were sharp and trenchant, not ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... Macedonian court and public affairs, there are several stories that implicate him dishonorably with political intrigues, and though there is not one of these that is not denied, and not one which rests on competent historical authority, such traditions are not apt so to cluster as to blur the fair fame of a sturdily incorruptible man, but are much more likely to cling to the memory of ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... building, and his niece standing a moment on the veranda watched the long train roll away down the faint blur of track that ran west to the farthest verge of the great white wilderness. Then with a little impatient gesture she went ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... run up and down his back at the horror of it; he seemed paralyzed; he could not move. And then, from somewhere out in that blur of ...
— Continuous Vaudeville • Will M. Cressy
... ruins of his life! Behind him followed the same inexorable antagonist who so swiftly had brought everything crashing about his head. Possibly Sorenson once out of the town had failed to look back; possibly looking back he had been unable to distinguish against the blur of houses and trees the horseman galloping in the moonlight ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... the first proofs, and, with them, some degree of disappointment. Those covering the first outward and return journey between Pozieres and Le Sars were good, as were the next three, at the beginning of the second journey. Then came a confused blur of superimposed ground-patterns, and at the last five results blank as the brain of a flapper. A jamb in the upper changing-box had led to five exposures on ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... postboy. And peering through the haze before us I saw the tollgate, sure enough, and I turned to stare back down the road towards the second hard-riding horseman, and presently beheld a vague blur that resolved itself into a rapidly oncoming shape that swept down upon us through the swirling mist; the flutter of a long cloak, a spurred boot, a shadowy form bowed low in the saddle—all this I saw in one brief moment; then rose a hoarse shout from ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... nearer reach where there was a mass of rough water, and a certain tongue of shingle thrust out from the further bank. For days and weeks these river marks had warned the anxious inquirers that they might not expect sport. The diminution of the tongue of land on the one side, and a blur in the pure white of the foam on the other, told ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... all those years of loving thrift, Nor blame nor discord marred their lot; Each to the lover-life was gift; And each was free from blur or blot That called for silence ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... remained silent, or made little signs to one another as they watched the fire. Meanwhile the mother considered the papers, now with a gleam of anger in her eyes, as she read, and now with a momentary blur of tear-dimmed vision. Most of the letters she threw at once on the fire. They writhed a moment like living creatures, and of a sudden blazed out as if tormented into sudden confession of the passions of ...
— Mr. Kris Kringle - A Christmas Tale • S. Weir Mitchell
... certainly nervous, which was a queer thing; for ordinarily the swamp boy seemed to be as cool and self-possessed as an Indian brave, who thought it a blur on his manhood to display emotion in the face ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... I knew nothing; with the coming of help, the sense that I was no longer struggling unaided for life in those treacherous waters, all strength and consciousness left me. When I again awoke, dazed, trembling, a strange blur before my eyes, I was lying upon a sandy beach, with a cliff towering above me, its crest tree-lined, and I could hear the dash of waves breaking not far distant. I endeavored to raise myself to look about, but sank back helpless, fairly struggling for breath. An arm lifted ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... a little. MacRae was not even looking at her now. His eyes were turned to the sea, to hide the blur that crept into them ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... setting. The mountains floated in mid-sky, pearly pale, and magical under the rising moon. The little circle of light from our pink-shaded candles on the table (I say our, because Boy and I dined together) gave to the picture a bizarre effect, which French artists love to put on canvas; a blur of gold-and-rose artificial light, blending with the silver-green radiance of ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... the bells and the continued low blur of auto horns from Fifth Avenue, but his own street was silent and he was safe in here from all the threat of life, for there was his door and the long hall and his guardian bedroom—safe, safe! The arc-light shining into his ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... animal arose in an attitude of defense. Nodding to Joel that the moment had come, as the horse advanced and the enemy came within reach, the singing noose shot out, the wolf arose as if to spring, and the next instant Dog-toe whirled under spur and quirt, leaving only a blur behind as he shot across the corral. Only his rider had seen the noose fall true, the taut rope bespoke its own burden, and there was no time to shout. For an instant, Joel held his breath, only catching a swerve in the oncoming horse, whose rider bore down on the centre post ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... both in seeing and stating occurrences and in tracing or attributing motives, it is plain that history is not to be depended on in any absolute sense. That smooth and indifferent quality of mind, without a flaw of prejudice or a blur of theory, which can reflect passing events as they truly are, is as rare, if not so precious, as that artistic sense which can hold the mirror up to nature. The fact that there is so little historical or political prescience, ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... degree of immediacy, urgency, or exclusiveness with which the individual habitually applies the animistic or anthropomorphic formula in dealing with the facts of his environment. The animistic habit acts in all cases to blur the appreciation of causal sequence; but the earlier, less reflected, less defined animistic sense of propensity may be expected to affect the intellectual processes of the individual in a more pervasive way ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... dim blur upon the frosty night. It was near time for him to close his store, and when she entered he was turning out the loafers who had been cuddling close to ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... signs. Slight changes in orthoepy we cannot account for, except by pleading the general issue of custom. Why should foot and boot be sounded differently? Why food and good? Why should the Yankee mark the distinction between the two former words, and blur it in the case of the latter, thereby incurring the awful displeasure of the "Autocrat," who trusses him, falcon-like, before his million readers and adorers? Why should the Frenchman call his wooden shoe a sabot and his old shoe a savate, both from the same root? Alas, we must too often ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... tribe, and himself both gentle by nature and considerate of others according to his lights, which thoughtlessness might turn down or passion blur, but which burned steadily and brightly in the main, Charles Langholm felt stung to the soul by the last few words, in which Hugh Woodgate noticed nothing amiss. Steel's tone was not openly insulting, but ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... be avoided. Let not the possibility of general annihilation blur our perception of the task before us; above all, let us not count on the miraculous aid of chance. Hitherto, the promises of our imagination notwithstanding, we have always been left to ourselves, to our own resources. It is to our humblest efforts that every useful, enduring achievement of this ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... understand, for they were new dead. Had the Turks attacked and been driven back? When he had gone about thirty yards he stopped to take his bearings. On the right were the ruins of a large building set on fire by the guns. There was a blur of woods and the debris of walls round it. Away to the left another hill ran out farther to the east, and the place he was in seemed to be a kind of cup between the spurs. Just before him was a little ruined ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... an unaccountable blur in his sight. He could not see perfectly, and that was why, when Mrs. Belding entered the sitting-room, he was not certain that her face was as sad and ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... color and fine detail, a tale of years, in the opening and shutting of a door. So with Joseph, in the brief space of the lady's approach. And with him, as with the sleeper, it must have been—in fact it was, in his recollections, later—a blur of emotion. ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... not be that in the development needed to fit the individual for the full and glad enjoyment of the sunshine to come, a ray of light would blur the film, and spoil the picture instead of producing one that is strong, clear ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... various complications which blur the sharpness of this distinction in practice. To begin with, many instincts mature gradually, and while they are immature an animal may act in a fumbling manner which is very difficult to distinguish from learning. James ("Psychology," ii, 407) maintains that ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... blur, blemish, sully, disgrace, tarnish, dishonor; efface, erase, delete, obliterate, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... have not defined the outlines; I have suffused them with a haze of half-tints warm or golden, in such a sort that you can not lay your finger on the exact spot where background and contours meet. Seen from near, the picture looks a blur; it seems to lack definition; but step back two paces, and the whole thing becomes clear, distinct, and solid; the body stands out; the rounded form comes into relief; you feel that the air plays round it. And yet—I am not satisfied; I have misgivings. ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... be call'd, and to offset it, or finish it out, as if in Nature's and the great Muse's mockery of those poor mimes, came interpolated that scene, not really or exactly to be described at all, (for on the many hundreds who were there it seems to this hour to have left a passing blur, a dream, a blotch)—and yet partially to be described as I now proceed to give it. There is a scene in the play representing a modern parlor in which two unprecedented English ladies are inform'd by the impossible Yankee that he is not a man of fortune, and therefore undesirable for marriage-catching ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... invalid chair, with her face set toward the noble river sweeping into view around the base of a wooded bluff, and toward the line of its course beyond, where its hidden waters furrowed the forests to the northward and divided hill from hill. Yet to her eyes the landscape was but a blur, and she ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... held hers, and hers answered back, suddenly he saw a new knowledge dawn in their clear depths. She had somehow read him, underneath his evasions. She knew. And before she could turn that involuntary discovery of hers over in her mind and blur it with some of the discretions he was trying to maintain, she burst out, in ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... Now I am perfectly willing to travel as fast as any one, if necessity demands it, but to tear through a region as beautiful as Venetia at sixty miles an hour, with the incomparable landscape whirling past in a confused blur, like a motion-picture film which is being run too fast because the operator is in a hurry to get home, seems to me as unintelligent as it is unnecessary. Like all Italian drivers, moreover, our chauffeur insisted on keeping his cut-out wide open, thereby producing ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... are indignant that the satirist should have made this the climax to his praise of a woman. And yet, we fear, he saw only too truly. What unexpected failures have we seen, literally, in this respect! How often did the Martha blur the Mary out of the face of a lovely woman at the sound of a crash amid glass and porcelain! What sad littleness in all the department thus represented! Obtrusion of the mop and duster on the tranquil meditation of a husband and brother. ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... narcotics? You play with jackstraws, balls, bowls, horse and gun, estates and politics; but there are finer games before you. Is not time a pretty toy? Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals. Yonder mountain must migrate into your mind. The fine star-dust and nebulous blur in Orion, "the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor," must come down and be dealt with in your household thought. What if you shall come to discern that the play and playground of all this pompous history are radiations ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... combination of forms of no great refinement in themselves, but which give a varied skyline and a pretty play of light and shade. It amuses at the first glance, and as it rarely demands a second, it is well suited to turbid atmospheres, which blur outlines, and a chilly climate in which people cannot loiter out of doors. Moreover, the old-world memories it evokes, although in a minor degree than was the case with the Gothic, contribute to its facile popularity. But the classical ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... fire on shore, by which the defeated pirates lay carousing in the swamp. The other, a mere blur of light upon the darkness, indicated the position of the anchored ship. She had swung round to the ebb—her bow was now towards me—the only lights on board were in the cabin, and what I saw was merely a reflection ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... throwing herself face downwards on the ground, crawled to the edge. For an instant she closed her eyes, shrinking with a sick dread from what they might show her—Tony's young, lithe body lying broken on the rocks below, or, perhaps, only the dark blur of some awful and unmeasured depth which would never ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... staggering consciousness could realize was an immensity, an immeasurable uprearing that brought with it the same throat-gripping vertigo as comes from gazing downward from some great height—then a blur of white faces—intolerable shinings of hundreds upon thousands of eyes. Huge, incredibly huge, a colossal amphitheatre of jet, a stupendous semi-circle, held within its mighty arc the ivory platform on which ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... blur became visible in the nearer sky—moving blobs of silver luminosity in the mud-brown light of the Zed-ray. A hundred or more moving silver blobs. They were taking form. The silvery phosphorescent look faded, became grey-white. Took definite shape. Waving arms and legs! Bones bereft of flesh. ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... paddles because a wind would do the work, you know not the ways of the great explorer. He bade us ply the faster, till the canoe sped between earth and sky like an arrow shot on the level. The shore-line became a blur. Clumps of juniper and pine marched abreast, halted the length of time an eye could rest, and wheeled away. The swift current raced to meet us. The canoe jumped to mount the glossy waves raised by the beam wind. An upward tilt of her prow, ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... was made by Wilson in an extraordinary joint session of Congress, held on the 2d of April. In this, possibly his greatest speech, he was careful not to blur the idealistic principles which, since the spring of 1916, he had been formulating. War existed because Germany by its actions had thrust upon the United States the status of belligerent. But the American people must meet the challenge with their purpose clearly ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... the sea. As Ross headed toward the wave-washed coast he began to hear shouting and other sounds which made him believe that the besiegers were in the midst of an all-out assault. Yet those distant fires and rocketlike blasts into the sky had a wavery blur. And Ross, making his way with the effortless water cleaving of the diver, surfaced now and then to spot film curling up from the surface of the sea between the two standing rock pillars which marked the ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... weeks of our waiting draw to a close.... There is scarcely a leaf astir In the garden beyond my windows, where the twilight shadows blur The blaze of some woman's ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... her down the street until her blue dress, with its white trimming became a blur in the shadows. Then he struck out once ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... stopped and looked landwards, where the indistinct grey blur was beginning to take the pattern of fields and ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... Columbia. Then, before they realize it, comes the danger of going with the current on a river with rapids. The stream sweeps to a torrent, mad and unbridled. The canoe is as a chip in a maelstrom, the precipices racing past in a blur, the Indians hanging frantically to the gunnels, bawling aloud in fear, the terrified voyageurs reaching, . . . grasping, . . . snatching at trees overhanging from the banks. The next instant a rock has banged through bottom, tearing away ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... low forehead, and noticed that his eyes were small. He had a good, swaggering military figure to which uniform was becoming, and a kind of animal good looks which would deteriorate early. His colour would fix and deepen with the aid of steady daily drinking, and his features would coarsen and blur, until by the time he was forty the young jowl would have grown heavy and would end by being his ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... visions became more frequent than the idealistic. Gradually, coarse and uninteresting erotic dreams of women began to haunt his mind in sleep. A curious particular regarding the new type of vision was that he never dreamed of whole females, only of their sexual parts, seen in a blur; and the seminal emissions which attended the mental pictures left a feeling of fatigue and disgust. In course of time, his wife and he agreed to live separately so far as sexual relations are concerned. He then indulged his passion for males, and wholly lost those rudimentary female dreams which ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... rudder-lines, with the result that as the cutter glided once more rapidly over the little waves she made a sharp curve to starboard, and then as the line was once more loosened, glided on straight ahead for something dim and strange that stood out before them like a blur. ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... is not with me. I kiss her empty dress. Here I kneel beside it, not ashamed to bless Each dear bosom-fold of it that bears a breath of her, Makes my heart a house of pain, and my eyes a blur. ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... with a protest of rusty hinges, and Ruan saw the Parson standing on the threshold. A woman's face, pale and strained, swam out of the darkness behind, and to Ruan, materialist though he was, came the thought that the pale blur looked like the face of someone drowning in a black flood. He put the idea aside and nodded slightly at the woman. She gave a gasp of relief, and, pushing by the priest, walked over ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse |
