"Blur" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prospect into the way, as will intice any man to enter into it. Nay he dooth as if your journey should lye through a fayre Vineyard, at the first give you a cluster of Grapes, that full of that taste you may long to passe further. He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with interpretations and load the memory with doubtfulnesse: but hee commeth to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-inchaunting skill of Musicke; and with a tale forsooth he commeth unto you: with a tale which holdeth ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... were obliged to lock him in," cried the "good woman," following to the door, to clear every blur from her virtues; "for his own sake I done it, for I felt my cry a-coming, and to see me cry—Lord bless you, the effect upon him is to call out for a walking-stick and ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... journey is seven miles, ten if pasture fails, in a windless blur of dust, feeding as it goes, and resting at noons. Such hours Pete weaves a little screen of twigs between his head and the sun—the rest of him is as impervious as one of his own sheep—and sleeps while ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... in the temperament and in the transmuting and modifying medium. More or less of filtration does it all. Nature makes the poet, not by adding to, but by taking from; she takes all blur and opacity out of him; condenses, intensifies; lifts his nerves nearer the surface, sharpens his senses, and brings his whole organization to an edge. Sufficient filtration would convert charcoal into diamonds; and we shall everywhere find that the purest, most ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... fall asleep at all? If so, was my first waking a dream-waking, and the real one only when the thing was gone? I'm not an imaginative man; my mind, at home, usually worked with some precision; but this,—there seems to be, you might say, a blur, a—film over my mental retina. You see, I'm not a psychologist, and therefore can't use the big, foggy terms of man's conceit to explain what he ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... behind their blur, didn't answer. Indeed, she could not have defined that sweetly sad glow, now so cruelly crushed, ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... 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 from yourself, and that the sun borrows his beams? What terrible questions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... a young tree on the edge of a wood When the mist is weaving and drifting. Slowly the boughs disappear and the leaves reach out Like the drowning hands of children, Till a grey blur quivers cold Where the green grace drank of the sun. So now, as I gaze, the morrows Creep weaving and winding their mist Round the beauty of her who sings. They hide the soft rings of her hair, Dear as a child's curling fingers; They shut out the trembling sun ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... inn and waited there in a long, narrow room, lit by a few small oil-lamps and crammed with soldiers. They were eating and drinking in vehement haste. Wherever the light from the lamps fell on them, you saw faces flushed and scarred under a blur of smoke and grime. Here and there a bandage showed up, violently white. On the tables enormous quantities of ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... into Lanyard's eyes, dazzling them, as he peered through a narrow opening in the portieres; and though the light was instantly shifted, for several moments a blur of peacock colour, blending, ebbing, hung like a curtain in the darkness, and he could see nothing distinctly—only the trail traced by that dancing spot-light ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... her view through the glasses was beginning to blur when the gates of the stockade swung back and five horses dashed out, running at top speed under the urge of the spurs. A rider leaned low upon the neck of each horse and they scattered wide as they fanned out across the basin, a ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... and quite futile effort to assure him that she was nothing of the sort. But she knew that no more than a blur of sound came from her lips, and even while she strove to make herself intelligible the floating world became a dream, and darkness fell ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the tragedies and comedies might be simmered down to one thing. Were there biscuits in the basket? But Betty Dalrymple did not laugh; her eyes were like stars on a wintry night; her face was white as paper. It was turned now from the steersman—ahead. She saw the blur before them become a definite line of green; later she made out details, the large heads of small trees. The former looked like big overflowing cabbages; the trunks, beneath, sprawled this way and that, as the vagaries ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... 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 most ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... their firelocks under their great-coats, and their collars turned up against the rain, lounged by the embrasures of the shore-wall, and gossiped dejectedly, or eyed in silence the blurred boat bobbing up and down in the grey blur ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... parks of New York to find the picturesque and lovely. Such open areas as Washington and Madison Squares hold varying aspects of beauty and imaginative suggestion, from sunrise to moonset. Large enough to admit the play of light and to blur a bit the building lines at their further side, these squares reward the seeing eye with ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... have been acquired only by uninterrupted application; she spoke French, German, and Italian with unusual purity. That intellect, as strong and clear as crystal, could never have suffered even a temporary blur. He was beginning to be amazed at the blunder he had committed, when suddenly, one evening, a peculiar note in her voice, accompanied by a certain lifting of the eyelashes—a movement he had noticed for the first time, but which was familiar to him—threw Lynde into great ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... him, all painted with eyes. All the real, as he rode, was the horse at his thighs, And the thought "They'll come back, if I've luck, if I'm wise." Some banners uncrumpled on the blue of the skies, The cheers became frantic, the blur of men shook, As Thankful and Kubbadar went at ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... 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 ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... that to-day is the full moon—the first full moon of this year's springtime. In years to come I may perchance be reminded of this night, with the tee-tee of the bird on the bank, the glimmer of the distant light on the boat off the other shore, the shining expanse of river, the blur of shade thrown by the dark fringe of trees along its edge, and the white sky gleaming overhead in ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... see the glance, and before long he was incapable of seeing anything saving the flash of the disk, the blur of the alternate colors as they spun together. He paid no heed to the path of the sunlight as it stretched along the floor under the window and told of a westering sun. The first Terry knew of it he was standing in a warm ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... meeting with Maurice, she ate her lunch with a glance every few minutes at her great-uncle Allan on the opposite wall. A very black portrait, it seemed only a meaningless blur till in a certain light the strong face and stern eyes shone out of the surrounding gloom with startling effect. She sometimes wondered rather anxiously if the uncle to whose home-coming she looked forward, could by any ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... our street it has acquired an alien grace and beauty. Perhaps a scrawny neighbor by the name of Falstaff might remain inconsequent, but I am sure that if a lady called Messilina moved in next door and were of charming manner, a month would blur the bad suggestion of her name; which presently—if our gardens ran together—would come to sound sweetly ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... tops of the slender saplings, stopping every few yards to half- stretch himself out in the soft mass through which he was struggling, panting with exhaustion. He shouted when he gained the top of the ridge. Up through the white blur of snow on the other side there came to him faintly a shout; yet, in spite of its faintness, Jan knew that ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... his warning, and something spanked on the planking a yard from my feet. I stepped over to the vague blur on the deck and picked up a slipper—a slipper covered with some woven straw stuff and soled with a matted felt, perhaps a half-inch thick. Another struck somewhere abaft the mast, and then McCord reappeared above and began ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... this adventure. He became uneasy and thoughtful. He imagined that he was beginning to see things through Digrung's eyes, and that there were strange troubles immediately ahead. The next time his eyes started to blur, he fought it down with his ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... his kind don't stop to look at the brand on a steer if they happen to feel hungry," explained Bud. "They'll cut one out of the herd, or appropriate a maverick, or an unbranded calf, and feast up on it. They'll skin it, salt down the hide after they blur the brand, and get ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... Rallywood himself, well as he knew the country, became bewildered; but luckily the horse he rode was a charger he had had with him on the Frontier. He left it to choose its own direction, yet it was long before a blur of light which he knew to be the open doorway of the block-house grew out ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... An expression of stupid amazement came over Friday's face. The design of asteroid and planets wavered into a blur as the Hawk fought unconsciousness; a short, harsh sound came from his lips; he lurched uncertainly. The negro crumpled up and stretched out on the deck. Carse's desire to sleep grew overpowering. Once more, as from a distance, he glimpsed Ku Sui's smile. He tried to back to the ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... hollow, and over the field went the 65th in a wild charge. The noise of a thousand seas was in the air, and the smoke of the bottomless pit. The yellow flashes of the guns came through it, and a blur of colour—the flag on the bank. On went their own great battle-flag, slanting forward as Billy Maydew ran. The bank flamed and roared. A bullet passed through the fleshy part of the boy's arm. He looked sideways at the blood. "Those durned bees sure do sting! ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... was in the middle of a line of eight destroyers. Two hundred yards ahead of him he could just discern the dim black blur of the next ahead and the occasional splutter of whity-grey foam in her wake as her stern lifted to the seas. At times, when a driving rain squall came down from windward, he seemed to lose sight of her altogether, and, through inexperience and in his anxiety to catch up, increased the revolutions ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... they register on our navigating charts, sir," said Hendricks slowly. Hendricks, my youthful third officer, had an inquiring, almost scientific mind. I have often said he was the closest approach to a scientist I have ever seen in the person of an action-loving man. "They're a blur of light on the charts—all out of proportion to their actual size. They must be something more than material bodies, ...
— Vampires of Space • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... it, but the flame of my wax match showed her fingers, clasping the wires of the lantern. The cloak slipped away, showing her arm’s soft curve, the blue and white of her bodice, the purple blur of violets; and for a second I saw her face, with a smile quivering about her lips. My grandfather was beating impatiently with his stick, urging us to leave the ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... 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 ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... human endeavor; it sanctifies defeat and denial; it polishes manners; it gives to morals a tincture of devotion; and, as with the spell of magic, such as Milton describes in "Comus," it dissipates with a glance the wild rout of low desires and insane follies which so much blur and blot up the otherwise fair face of human society. It permits of no meanness in its train; it expels vulgarity, and, with a high stretch toward perfected humanity, it unearths the grovelling nature, and gives it aspirations of ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... banisters, a handrail: all indistinguishable. One step farther down or up, and why? But up is harder. Down! Down to this white blur; ...
— Some Imagist Poets - An Anthology • Richard Aldington
... he staggered into the Preparation room and sat at his desk with his brows on his hand and his eyes on his book. The print danced before his gaze: letter rushed into letter, word merged mistily into word, line into line, till all was a grey blur. A blink of the eyes—an effort of the will—a sort of "squad, shun!" to the type before him—and the words jumped back into their places, letters separated from their entanglement and stood like soldiers at spruce attention. A relaxing of the effort—and dismiss! helter-skelter, pell-mell went ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... a rich contralto voice, that of a boy rather than a man, the slight blur of the South distinguishable even ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... fraction of a second a furry catapult launched itself across the wide road at a speed that made it look like tawny blur. ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... shakes The quiet clusters of the bees To powdery drift; He tosses them away, He drives them like spray; He makes them veer and shift Around his blustering path. In clouds blindly whirling, In rings madly swirling, Full of crazy wrath, So furious and fast they fly They blur the earth and blot the sky In wild, white mirk. They fill the air with frozen wings And tiny, angry, icy stings; They blind the eyes, and choke the breath, They dance a maddening dance of death Around their work, Sweeping the cover from the hill, ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... which seemed to trouble him slightly enough. He thought with a faint, wistful interest of the various ports of call, of the days which might pass, each one bringing him nearer the end. He suffered himself, even, to think of that faint blur upon the horizon, the breath of the spicy winds, the strange home perfumes of the bay, as he drew nearer and nearer to the outstretched arms of his country. Well, if not he, another! It was something to have ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a mile distant. Somewhat nearer, a blur of white radiance amid the dashing rain, was the headlight of No. 38 showing that she was coming at momentarily increasing speed. Ralph aimed to run nearer to the air line stretch to plant the signal. ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... in the seclusion of the sitting-room, with a book opened before him, he had been thinking hard. It was not the talk with Alice that occupied his thoughts. That rose in his mind from time to time, only as a disagreeable blur, and he refused to dwell upon it. It was nothing to him, he said to himself, what Gorringe's motives in lying had been. As for Alice, he hardened his heart against her. Just now it was her mood to try and make ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... response to an exceptionally strident outburst of sound, they beheld the line of lights suddenly incline from the horizontal, saw the slope grow steadily steeper, and then, as the great mass of the vessel's stern hove up, an indistinct blur of deeper blackness on the darkness of the night, the line of lights slid forward and vanished one after another until all had disappeared, while at the same moment a heartrending wail from hundreds of throats pealed out across the water, punctuated ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... near the Mather Safe, as I have already said, that my favorite alcove opened. In the short winter afternoon, when the twilight thickened without the building, and the type began to blur within, I would lay aside my book and muse over wild rumors of secrets borne by this messenger between the generations. Journals and letters, it was said, were there concealed, which should change the current gossip of history, and explode many bubble-reputations ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... searching it as his were searching hers, luminously and with a swiftly kindling fire. Her lips parted a little, trembling. There was a sort of bloom on her skin that became more visible as the blood, wave on wave, came flushing in behind it. His vision of her swam suddenly away in a blur as his own ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... come down to his place in a hurry.'—'An' who the devil is your masther?' says I; 'an' didn't think ye had one, only yourself, an' you so fine.'—'Oh,' says he, 'my masther is the Prence Ragin.'—'Blur an' ouns,' says I; 'tell his honour I'll be wid him in the twinklin' ov a bedpost, the minit I take my face from behind my beard, an' get on my clane flax; but stop a bit,' says I; 'where does the masther live?'—'Down at Carltown Palace,' says he; 'so make yourself dacent, an' ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... the schooner, which had apparently followed them, a blur of dusky canvas against a bank of haze, and then as the boat slid down into a hollow there was nothing but the low-hung, lowering sky. It was evident to him that if they were to make a landing ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... defacement, disgrace, injury, spot, blur, defect, dishonor, reproach, stain, brand, deformity, fault, smirch, stigma, crack, dent, flaw, soil, taint, daub, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... back to the fire, and he saw again the red bakneesh hanging over his tent flap, and the words she had scrawled with the end of a charred stick, "In honor of the living." That meant him. Something thick and uncomfortable rose in his throat, and a blur that was not caused by snow or wind filled his eyes. She had made a magnificent fight. And she had won. And it suddenly occurred to him that what she had said in the note was true, and that Scottie Deane could easily have killed him. ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... No one had tried to silence the man or to soothe the woman's horror. But has any one who saw it forgotten her face? To me for the rest of the day it was a sensible rather than a merely mental image. Constantly a red blur rose before my eyes for a background, and against it appeared the dwarf's head, lifted with sobs, under the provincial black lace veil. And at night what emphasis it gained on the boundaries of sleep! Close to my hotel there was a roofless theatre crammed ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... be too late. The news would have been passed on. The victory of the Allies and the lives of thousands of our soldiers were at stake. Next instant I had pulled out the loaded revolver and fired two shots after the vanishing figure, already only a dark blur in the dusk. I heard a scream, the crashing of the breaking cycle, and ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... blur the sharpness of this distinction in practice. To begin with, many instincts mature gradually, and while they are immature an animal may act in a fumbling manner which is very difficult to distinguish from learning. James ("Psychology," ii, 407) maintains that children walk by instinct, ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... slowly, a shapeless, round blur in the pale light. Inch by inch it drifted toward them, until Chet moved one hand abruptly and found he had created a ripple of light by which he could see more clearly. And he saw before him ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... was a blur and a haze, of which Joe was the centre—Joe half crazed and impatient, making ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... blur over the words "wooden-head," as if Hector had known that Margaret would disapprove, and had tried to scratch it out. She wrote all the consolation in her power, and exhorted him to patience, apparently without much ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... They were poor, else Amity might never have been. They lived in a house which had been, in its day, as pretentious as the Saunders mansion. At the time of Maria's first visit to Amity it had been a weather-beaten old structure, which had not been painted for years, and had a curious effect as of a blur on the landscape, with its roof and walls of rain and sun stained shingles and clapboards, its leaning chimneys, and its Corinthian pillars widely out of the perpendicular, supporting crazily the roofs of the double veranda. When Maria went to Amity ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... was like a map unrolled at their feet. Still as a vision it stretched to where sky and earth fused in a golden haze. No sound or motion broke its dreaming quiet, vast, brooding, self-absorbed, a land of abundance and accomplishment, its serenity flowing to the faint horizon blur. Lines of trees, showing like veins, followed the wandering of streams, or gathered in clusters to suck the moisture of springs. Nearby a pool gleamed, a skin of gold linked by the thread of a rivulet to other pools. They shone, a line of glistening ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... 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 lawyer ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... I stole to the parlor door. At my old seat by the window was Emily Warren, writing on a portfolio in her lap. For a second a blur came over my vision, and then I devoured her with my eyes as the famishing would look ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... Trella wasn't sure. She had the impression that Kregg's fist connected squarely with the short man's chin before he dodged to one side in a movement so fast it was a blur. But that couldn't have been, because the short man wasn't moved by that blow that would have felled a steer, and Kregg roared in pain, grabbing ...
— The Jupiter Weapon • Charles Louis Fontenay
... faint blur on the surface of the mirror in Mr Carker's chamber, and its reflection was, perhaps, a false one. But it showed, that night, the image of a man, who saw, in his fancy, a crowd of people slumbering on the ground at his feet, like ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... 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 ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... the hills, I forgive, I forget Life's hoard of regret— All the terror and pain of a chafing chain. Grind on, O cities, grind! I leave you a blur behind. I am lifted elate—the skies expand; Here the world's heaped gold is a pile of sand. Let them weary and work in their narrow walls; I ride with the voices of waterfalls. I swing on as one in a dream—I swing. ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... exact reproductions. A real person ordinarily has too much of the commonplace and conventional about him to serve in fiction, where—despite the apparent paradox—a character must be exaggerated to appear natural. A person in fiction is at the best but a blur of hieroglyphics on a sheet of paper, and can be comprehended only through the mentality of the author; therefore his description, his actions, his words, his very thoughts must be made so unnaturally striking that through the sense of sight alone they will stimulate the imagination ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... 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 white ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... blankness came upon him, and he could only move feebly on, seeing everything in a blur and mist. After these long days and nights of sleeplessness, semi-starvation, and terrible excitement, every nerve was sick, every organ out of gear. The lights of the Tuileries, the stately pile of the Louvre, under a gray driving sky.—There ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... relief. Take away the human nature, and that contrast disappears, and with it goes the distinction between divine person and divine nature. Then, instead of a transcendent personality in whose portrait divine and human features are distinctly limned, we have a blur. Where God planned a unique though intelligible psychic harmony, we ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... tympan of the duplicating machine is sometimes made uneven so that the impression of a typewriter is still further carried out. Some duplicating machines advertise that their type print "loose" for this very purpose. A favorite scheme with firms where letter presses are used is to blur the letter slightly after it has been filled in and signed. A word "XXX'd" out as by a typewriter lends an impression of the personal message, as does also the wrong spelling of a word, corrected by pen ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... her pain; and with knotted brows rapidly considering, and rejecting, one after another, the desperate expedients that suggested themselves. Suddenly looking up he perceived among the trees, at the distance of a few paces, Rina standing. Hot anger instantly welled up in his breast, and made a red blur before his eyes. Rina's sex was no protection to her then. He picked up ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... the doctor away from the piano, and thus there was no one near to see how at last the bright color began to fade from her cheeks as the notes before her ran together, and the keys assumed the form of one huge key which Maddy could not manage. There was a blur before her eyes, a buzzing in her ears, and just as the dancers were entering heart and soul into the merits of a popular polka, there was a sudden pause in the music, a crash among the keys, and a faint cry, which to those nearest to her sounded ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... Deacon demanded truculently, and then went on to deny the half-caste's knowledge. "You chaps put on a lot of side over a new chum. I've done some sailing myself, and this naming a craft when its sail is only a blur, or naming a man by the sound ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... blur ahead of them detached itself from the surrounding darkness, until even skeptical Tom and Billy knew that what they saw was a body of men bearing down steadily ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... they yet had, in a sense, the tacit nearness of complicity. Yes, they were accomplices; he could no more be jealous of her than she could despise him. The jealousy that would once have seemed a blur on her whiteness now appeared like a tribute to ideals in which he no ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... vapor arising from the stack which instantly disappeared. In the opposite direction there was a wide expanse of water, quiet as a mill-pond in spite of a fresh breeze, revealing in the distance the faint blue blur of a far-off coast line. Nothing broke the vista except the white sails of two sloops, evidently fishing boats, far off on the horizon. It was an ideal spot in which to lie—to quietly hide in during the hours of daylight, probably never approached but by stray fishermen. Ashore everything ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... common-room. The summer heat surging up from the burning pavements stagnated between the faded walls. He could not touch the food that he had brought with him. He was faint and sick, and the long table at which he sat, with its white blur of newspapers, rose and fell as though it were floating on an oily sea. But he held out. At five o'clock he was to meet Francey at the gates, and, as though she had some magic gift of relief, he strained towards that time, his head between his hands, his ears counting ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... you are as obtuse as the critics who may one day hover hungrily over it. Try the aid of one more clew, and if you fail to catch my purpose, I will dash my brush all loaded with ochre, right into those mystic, prescient eyes, and blur them forever. ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... fiddles are drowned, and guitars smothered, and one sort of drum mistaken for another sort; but whensoever the brazen note of the McClintockian trombone breaks through that fog of music, that note is recognizable, and about it there can be no blur of doubt. ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... Glory—no tyrant-dealt scars, No blur on her brightness, no stain on her stars! The brave blood of heroes hath crimsoned her bars. She's the flag of our ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... Henry Overton, U. S. A.,'" replied Hal, turning the envelope so that his mother might read. But a sudden rush of mist to her eyes made the letters blur. ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Lieutenants - or, Serving Old Glory as Line Officers • H. Irving Hancock
... Margaret, for there was a long pause—a pause that was somehow akin to the flicker of the fire, the quiver of the reading-lamp upon their hands, the white blur from the window; a pause of shifting and ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... quite dark when he returned to his window, but the far shore was only an indistinct blur of gloom. The fires were brighter. One of them, built solely because of the rivermen's inherent love of light and cheer, threw the blaze of its flaming logs twenty ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... words were hardly out of his mouth before Gussie was out of the cupboard. I have commented on the speed with which he had gone in. It was as nothing to the speed with which he emerged. There was a sort of whir and blur, and he ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... scheme of things is so absolute that what most modern writers would regard as the illogical dreams of superannuated eccentrics he is inclined to treat with smiling reverence and infinite sympathy. Where the whole terrestrial business is only a meaningless blur upon the face of nothingness, why should we not linger by the way, under elm trees, or upon broken fragments of old temples, or on sunny benches in cloistered gardens, and listen to the arbitrary fancies of unpractical and incompetent persons whose countenances ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... efforts of its straining oarsman. The passengers had taken refuge under the felze, or gondola hood. Impatient of the slow progress of the boat, the Colonel looked down into the hotel-garden directly beneath his windows, which was drowned in a moist blur, that only seemed intensified where it focused about the electric lights. Over there again, across the Canal, stood the great Salute, showing ghostly and unreal in its massive whiteness, half obliterated ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... than 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
... and the others had anticipated, there were plenty of signs showing where the cattle had been driven off. A large herd was missing, and it must have taken a number of rustlers to have rounded them up and started them toward Double Z, or whatever place was to be used to change, or blur the brands, so the cattle could be sold to some innocent purchaser, perhaps. Though there were not wanting, in that ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... appearance by which we know it. So I have not defined the outlines; I have suffused them with a haze of half-tints warm or golden, in such a sort that you can not lay your finger on the exact spot where background and contours meet. Seen from near, the picture looks a blur; it seems to lack definition; but step back two paces, and the whole thing becomes clear, distinct, and solid; the body stands out; the rounded form comes into relief; you feel that the air plays round it. And yet—I am not satisfied; I have ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... as swift, Attusah is on his feet. At the back of the great niche, so high that none could conceive that it might afford an exit, a fissure lets in a vague dreary blur of light from spaces beyond. Leaping high into the air, the lithe young warrior fixes his fingers on the ledge, crumbling at first, but holding firm under a closer grasp. The elder man, understanding the ruse as if by instinct, lays hold of the knees of the other, ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... 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 rather that of banter, misplaced ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... cut through the river-water and sent two rolling waves to right and to left of us. With every throb of the engines we sprang and quivered like a living thing. One great yellow lantern in our bows threw a long, flickering funnel of light in front of us. Right ahead a dark blur upon the water showed where the Aurora lay, and the swirl of white foam behind her spoke of the pace at which she was going. We flashed past barges, steamers, merchant-vessels, in and out, behind this one and round the other. ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... her finger, and strained my eyes to see. All I could make out was a dim greyish mist, with something like a little spot or blur on it, at the place which the maid's finger indicated as the position occupied by the ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... strange impulse, the girlish figure turned and made straight for the wildly yelling men, who stood in the form of a great circle in the center of which two men weaved and milled about each other in a blur of motion. ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... 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 ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... a fair illustration of the matchless agility of the crotalus when he cares to be quick. The cage was just twelve inches high in the clear; but before the falling mouse was halfway to the bottom, there was an indescribable gray blur, and I knew that the larger snake had hit him. I have improved numerous chances to study the stroke of rattlesnake, which is the swiftest motion made by any living creature; but that particular case, better than any other, gave me ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... Canterbury, without making any stay at Dover. The shouting and joy expressed by all is past imagination. Seeing that my Lord did not stir out of his barge, I got into a boat and so into his barge. My Lord almost transported with joy that he had done all this without any the least blur or obstruction in the world, that could give offence to any, and with the great honor he thought it would be ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... on the couch, and she raised her head. In the half darkness he could not have seen how she was suffering. Her face was only a warm blur to him, vague and sweet and beautiful, with tender eyes. He said: "I think—I'm falling asleep. My head is so very, very queer! What is the matter with my head? Coira, do you think I might be kissed before I go ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... somebody called, for convenience, Sandy—the "Biggest of Them All." But Cynthia's ideal bore little likeness to the actual Sandy, and her letters had become but the outpourings of a heart that must create its own Paradise or perish. Sandy Morley had faded into an indistinct blur, but the romance he had awakened bore the girl far and away from the ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... all, the running walk, and began to enjoy the vista; the wide-sweeping, southern reaches dotted with buttes, the line of the far hills crowded against the sky, and the intense light in which there was no faintest trace of blur or moisture. Everything within normal range of vision stood out ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... the weariness he lunged forward again, swinging the now deadened right arm at the blur Corrigan made in front of him. Something collided with him—a human form—and thinking it was Corrigan, clinching with him, he grasped it. The momentum of the object, and his own weakness, carried ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... right. He's what you could call a runnin' fool!" We shot past somethin' that was just a black blur for a minute and then disappeared back in the dust. "What was that?" ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... audacity. Nevertheless he sat still a moment, straining his eyes down the long hill, for it was the most confusing hour of the evening, the hour when the last clearness from the upper sky is merged with the rising night in a blur that disguises landmarks ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... head, and grunted at a red blur very low in the mist. A fire was burning on the low point of land where Nichols—the Nova Scotian—had planted the battery which had worked such havoc with Admiral Rowley's boats. It was a mere earthwork and some of ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... and French terms, not correctly used and not even rightly spelt, his endless iterations, lists, catalogues, categories, things not clearly visualised or even remotely perceived, but swept relentlessly in, like the debris of some store-room, all these are ugly mannerisms which simply blur and encumber the pages. The question is not whether they offend a critical and cultured mind, but whether they produce an inspiring effect upon any ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... down to the Village was long enough to induce that odd motion-hypnosis so common in night flight over a metropolitan area. The dizzy blur of red and green running lights from air-borne traffic at levels above and below us, the shapes of 'copters silhouetted beneath us against the lambent glow of the city's well-lit streets, all ...
— Modus Vivendi • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the body. In it existed those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his models of Hercules, Phoebus, and Jove; not like the forms abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein the face is a confused blur of features, but composed of incorrupt, sharply defined and symmetrical features, whose eye-sockets are so formed that it would be impossible for such eyes to squint and take furtive glances on this side and on that, but they must turn the whole head. The manners ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... groves and the orange gardens were so entirely perfect that I became quite a Pre-Raphaelite, and loathed the ordinary impressionists whose muddly souls and blurred intelligences would have rendered, but by mud and blur, those "golden lamps hung in a green night" that filled me with such joy. The elaborate and exquisite detail of the true Pre-Raphaelite is the compensation they offer us for the absence of motion; literature and motion being the only arts ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... employed, the object being to blur the lower portion of the plate, leaving the head of the subject in relief. Every Daguerreotypist is familiar with the fact that a motion of any body between the camera and the sitter will cause a "blur." Cut a piece of thin ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... her face was gravely thoughtful as she looked across the shining water towards the faint blur of a pine forest on a distant point, and Thirlwell felt as if they had been suddenly united ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... he saw a space between her two front teeth, as with children whose second teeth have just come. While they pushed along in the crowd she looked up intently at the man beside her, or off into the blur of light, where she evidently saw nothing. Her face, young and soft, seemed new to emotion, and her bewildered look made one feel that she did ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... very late interlopers, down to the sixth century, introduce modern details into the picture of life? did they blur the unus color? We hope to prove that, if they did so at all, it was but slightly. That the poems, however, with a Mycenaean or sub-Mycenaean basis of actual custom and usage, contain numerous contaminations from the usage of centuries as late as the seventh, is the view of Mr. Leaf, ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... on a valve so that with a hissing sound additional gas rushed into the bag. Jack pulled a lever. The big motors roared and a queer, sickly smell of burned gas filled the air. The propellers began to revolve slowly and then increased their speed till they became a mere blur. ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... 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, that no man of experience ventures to prophesy, is enough ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Anderson, the good old grandfather revived in his unfortunate, perhaps graceless grandson, reseated himself on the door-step and watched the bulky, receding figure of his visitor through a pleasant blur of tears, which made the broad, rounded shoulders and the halting columns of legs dance. This David Anderson had almost forgotten that there was unpaid kindness in the whole world, and it seemed to him as if he had seen angels walking up and down. He sat for a while doing nothing except ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... now going 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, nature seems to command him, ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... the blur of a dream to him, a dream which ended when he had found his head upon a cool, white pillow, and had felt glad, glad—dear God, how glad!—to know that Angy was still within reach of his outstretched hand; and so he had fallen asleep. But when he awoke in the morning, there stood Angeline ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund |
