"Blurred" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the arm-chair before the fire in which he had spent the evening. The light danced before him in blurred flashes. ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... little of detail; faces were blurred, unrecognizable; all I seemed to note clearly was that solid, brutal, heartless, blaspheming line of desperate men sweeping toward us with a relentless fury our puny bullets could not check. Reckless ferocity was in that mad rush; they pressed on more ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... and blurred eyes he moved painfully through the forest and over the sandy riverbank. On those rare occasions when he saw game his arms trembled so violently as he drew the bow that the arrow went wide and fell far short of ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... The eastward sides of the tree-trunks and naked branches glimmered pink; and dew-wet leaves, here and there, shone like pale jewels of pink, amber, and violet. The mirror-like surface of the river was blurred with twisting spirals of mist, silvery and opalescent, through which the dim-seen figure of a duck in straight flight shot ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... and over again, his blood firing with honest indignation. Thelma! Thelma—that pure white lily of womanhood,—was she to have her stainless life blurred by the trail of such a thing as the Snake?—and was Errington's honor to be attainted in his absence, and he condemned without a ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... Sand,—who has so much to lose! The qualities sacrificed, though almost intangible, are essential to the force of her charm. The cement is taken away and the fabric coheres imperfectly; and whilst the beauties of her manner are blurred, its blemishes appear increased; the lengthiness, over-emphasis of expression, questionable taste of certain passages, become more marked. Although nevertheless many of her tales remain pleasant reading, they suffer as much as translated poetry, and only a very ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... all this was irresistible—blent into an adorable whole with her ready understanding of high experience. (Of lower experience such as plays a great part in the world, poor Mrs. Casaubon had a very blurred shortsighted knowledge, little helped by her imagination.) But she took the smile as ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... suggestion of boyishness in tilted head and poised body, before the rays that wavered over his shoulder from the windows behind him disclosed the misty gladness of welcome in her eyes, splashed now with points of light not so very unlike the blurred star-points in the infinitely deep, purplish pool of the sky above them. Silently the man reached out and found the hand which had lain for ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... outer threshold. Mrs. Flanagan had, somehow, got there before him, with a lamp, and he followed her down through the dancing shadows, with blurred eyes. On the lower landing he stopped to hear the jar of some noisy wrangle, thick with oaths, from the bar-room. He listened for a moment, and then turned to the staring stupor ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... women of her type; he wondered what the end of their daily association would be. Then gradually his thinking ceased to be clear. His thirst more and more wove itself into his consciousness until his mind was a blurred fantasmagoria, in which, repeating itself over and over in the midst of strange ideas, would come the flashing sound of unattainable water. He did not talk, he did not think. Through the trees he wound his way with the grim determination of a ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... to speak, the sea of faces before her seemed blurred. She was talking into blank darkness. She could not even hear her own voice. But as she went on, and the needs of the soldiers crowded upon her mind, she forgot all fear, and for two hours held the audience spell-bound. Men ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... had to be constantly replaced. The result was great difference in the appearance of the notes, those printed from new plates being sharp and clear, while others, printed from old plates, were pale and blurred. These differences were a great assistance to the forger, as the public, being accustomed to variations of appearance between different genuine notes, were less apt to remark the difference between these ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... Geoffrey was allowed furlough from his bed for another half-hour, and with his face supported between his hands he continued to listen at the table. The flames of the candles were more and more blurred with a haze of tobacco smoke, the room became intolerably hot, the level of the wine grew steadily lower in the decanters, and the boy's face took a strained, quivering look, his pallour increased, his dark, wide-opened ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... actually congratulating the Navigator on our escape, and I had just told the gun's crew to cease firing at the blurred outlines on the port quarter from which the random shells still came, when there was a sheet of yellow flame and a jar which threw me against the signalman. The latter had been standing near the conning-tower hatch, and unfortunately I knocked him off his balance, ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... later we were both in a cab, and rattling through the silent streets on our way to Charing Cross Station. The first faint winter's dawn was beginning to appear, and we could dimly see the occasional figure of an early workman as he passed us, blurred and indistinct in the opalescent London reek. Holmes nestled in silence into his heavy coat, and I was glad to do the same, for the air was most bitter, and neither of us had broken ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... the letter again and again, until the words seemed blurred and the lines irregular as a spider's web. Then she thought: "We can not part forever like this. I must see him again whatever happens. Perhaps he has ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... bit dim at the end. But in that very dimness, so tantalizing and yet so revealing, lies two-thirds of Conrad's art, or his craft, or his trick, or whatever you choose to call it. What he shows us is blurred at the edges, but so is life itself blurred at the edges. We see least clearly precisely what is nearest to us, and is hence most real to us. A man may profess to understand the President of the United ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... expressed volumes of shocked proprieties; so I quickly withdrew my gaze, since it was not at all comforting, and devoted myself exclusively to the poor little baby. Its clothing had got all awry, its hands were blue with cold, and the tears from its pretty, blurred eyes were running in a copious stream. I dried its face, took off its cap and cloak, and got its garments nicely straightened out, and then to complete the cure, for want of something better, gave it my long suffering watch to nibble. The little creature ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... looking with blurred eyes at the sea, wished she might wave again and reassuringly to the boy on the steamer, facing the long voyage so drearily. Then she realized that she still could, in a sense, wave to him. The steamer ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... of safety the earthquake was cradling its fire; the ground was growing hollow beneath his tread; but his ear was too dull to catch the sound; his vision too blurred to read ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... to the scratched window-panes and the crude prospect, blurred now by the gathering shadows of the early evening. In the yards below, a long freight-train was pulling in from the west, with a switching-engine chasing it to begin the cutting out of the Copah ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... it would become indistinct. How gentle he was, and how different from Henry! "Nancy!" he repeated. Then the root became altogether blurred and meaningless, and she felt him take her in his arms and kiss her. "Darling Nancy," he was saying; and, somehow, to her great relief, she found ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... horses and horse-riders, and (car-warriors and) car-drivers. I did not in that battle, O king, see a single elephant or steed or human warrior that was not struck with Partha's shafts. Their vision blurred by dust and darkness, thy warriors became perfectly cheerless and unable to distinguish one another. Urged on by fate and with their vital limbs cut open and mangled with shafts, they began to wander, or limp, or fall down. And some amongst them, O Bharata, became paralysed ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... guard, almost nonchalantly. He looked at the address on the card. 12406 Kenman Road. He rooted around in his fading memory of Yawk, but he found the details had blurred under the impact of five years of Mars and Venus and the Belt and Neptune. He did not know ...
— The Happy Unfortunate • Robert Silverberg
... the others, having been apparently one of the last of the series, taken when the aeroplane was at a great height. The only thing in which it differed from the others was that it seemed a trifle blurred. ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... the drawings to steel, and published them in 1838, with letterpress by Alfred Crowquill. Mr. Henry G. Bohn issued an edition in 1842, and another some twenty-three years later, with plates so sadly worn and blurred by over use that the best part of this last edition (issued by the Routledges in 1878) is ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... a paleface, his cheeks were of a brick red. His moist blue eyes, blurred and bloodshot, twitched involuntarily. For a long time he had driven through grass and snow from this solitary station to the Indian village. His weather-stained clothes fitted badly his warped shoulders. He was stooped, and his protruding ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... breathing deep when, stomach full and resentment toward the past blurred by satisfaction with his present, he filled his pipe and fingered his vest pocket for a match. "Gas stoves can't cook nothin' so there's any taste to it. That there's the first real meal I've et ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... opened to him, and the adventures of the Trojan heroes became his daily lesson. But that he had to feed his interest, crumb by crumb, painfully gathered by dictionary and grammar, made him chafe. He enjoyed it, though, with all of us, when, after each day's recitation—after we boys had marred and blurred the elegance and spirit of Virgil's eloquence with all sorts of laboured, limping translations, that made Mr Clare fairly writhe in his chair—our tutor would drop a word of commendation for Walter's better rendering ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... woman quarrelled fiercely. She could hear them raging at each other as she lay trembling. Then came shrieks, and the dull sound of the sjambok cutting soft human flesh. In the morning the woman had a black eye; there were livid weals on her tear-blurred face. She packed her boxes, snivelling. She was going back along up to Johannesburg by the next thither-bound transport-waggon-train that should halt at the hotel—thrown off like an old shoe after all these years. And she was not young ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... had never rained so hard, he thought. Already, the lake, the mountain slopes, the villas and vineyards westward, were totally blotted out, hidden behind walls and walls of water; and even the neighbouring lawns of Ventirose, the confines of his own garden, were barely distinguishable, blurred as by a fog. The big drops pelted the river like bullets, sending up splashes bigger than themselves. And the tiled roof just above his head resounded with a continual loud crepitation, as if a multitude of iron-shod elves were dancing on it. The thunder crashed, roared, reverberated, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... gracious age, having the aloof beauty of age and its true estimates of life. The perception of its loveliness is impersonal and leaves the line between the aesthetic and the sensuous clearly marked. Beneath a straighter sun the line is blurred and sometimes vanishes: no orchid-musk, no azure and distant hill, no tinted bay but accosts the senses, confusing one with another, mingling all the emotions in a single cup, persuading man that he knows good from evil as little as though he lived ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... showed clearer through the sunshine across the gleaming flats. It was possible now to see slight irregularities in it, as in a blurred dash of paint flung across a canvas by an uncertain hand, but impossible to distinguish palm trees. The air sparkled as if full of a tiny dust of intensely brilliant jewels, and near the ground there seemed to quiver a maze of dancing specks of light. Everywhere there was solitude, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... by the iron palings, John reviewed the events of the last hour. The view was blurred by unshed tears. His uncle and he had driven together to the Manor. Here, the explorer had exercised his peculiar personal magnetism upon the house-master, a tall, burly man of truculent aspect and speech. John realized proudly that his uncle was the bigger of the ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... As he came up the steps she felt herself pointing to the pack, and heard herself speaking words that were meaningless to her. He said good-by; he kissed her, released her, and turned away. His tall figure blurred in her sight, grew dim through dark, streaked ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... the enemy tongue came from the vision set. Someone was speaking crisply and precisely somewhere. Blurred, indistinct flashes appeared on the ...
— Morale - A Story of the War of 1941-43 • Murray Leinster
... vision of a girl blurred across his thoughts uncertainly, like a bright moth hovering in the distance whose shadow fell across his dusty path. But it was far away and vague, and only a glance in her eyes belonged to him. She ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... might be shown in his true light. But how much better he felt since he had eaten. He was comfortable and drowsy. The minister and his family, who had been bustling around attending to the wants of their guests, began to grow dim in his weary eyes. Watson, who was sitting opposite to him, looked blurred, indistinct. He was vaguely conscious that the old gentleman was saying: "These are times that try our souls." Then the boy sank back in his chair, sound asleep. He began to dream. He was on the cowcatcher of an engine. Andrews was tearing along in front on a horse, beckoning to him to come ...
— Chasing an Iron Horse - Or, A Boy's Adventures in the Civil War • Edward Robins
... pitched into space, with equal suddenness did I emerge from the fog, out of which I shot like a projectile from a cannon into clear daylight. My speed was so great that I could see nothing about me but a blurred and indistinct sheet of smooth and frozen snow, that rushed past me with ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... with the help of the light from a solitary candle hanging in a sconce upon the wall, it had once been a handsome building. Now, however, it had fallen sadly to decay. The ceiling of the hall had at one time been richly painted, but now only blurred traces of the design remained. Crossing the hall, my guide opened a door at the further end. In obedience to a request from Hayle, I entered this room, to find myself standing in a fine apartment, so far as size went, but sadly lacking in comfort where its furniture ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... will notice that the two sides look different; one side has certain little depressions as if it had been pricked with a pin, sometimes also some wavy streaks. Turn it round, and, looking at the other side, you still see these things, but blurred, as if seen through water, while the surface itself on this side looks smooth; what inequalities there are being projections rather than depressions. Now the side you first looked at is the side to cut on, and the side to paint on, and it is the side placed inwards ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... train rushed through Westphalia, through busy stations with glimpses of sidings full of trucks loaded to the brim, past towns whose very outlines were blurred by the mirk of smoke from a hundred factory chimneys, my thoughts were busy with that swarthy cripple. I had broken away from him with one portion of a highly prized document, yet he had made no attempt to have me arrested at the frontier. Clearly, then, he must still look ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... carefully inventoried and preserved the effects which he left behind him, namely, the contents of his small wardrobe, and a number of printed books of somewhat more consequence, together with certain, wofully blurred manuscripts, discovered in his repository. On looking these over, I found them to contain two Tales called "Count Robert of Paris," and "Castle Dangerous;" but was seriously disappointed to perceive ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... that," he continued. "We found one steer they'd killed, for beef likely, after they'd blurred th' brand. There wasn't much left. What th' rustlers didn't take th' buzzards did. But there was enough of th' hide left to show what work they were up to—blurring ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... been written with an indelible pencil. The dampness had only blurred the writing instead of erasing it. Her attention thus engaged, she idly scrutinized more than the blurred lines. Her attitude as she sat there on the boulder slowly stiffened; her ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... damp mist had crept up from the water front and enwrapped the city so that its lights showed like blurred moons. Some instinct took him toward the wharves. He could hear the distant cough of a tug as it fussed across the bay, and as he drew near the big Transcontinental wharves of Joe Powers the black hulk of a Japanese liner rose black out of the gray fog shadow. But the freighters, the coasters, ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... of drifting rain And a blurred white lamp o'erhead, That shines as my love will shine again In the world of ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... In their sweet innocence They trusted to his word; Meanwhile, the sparkling morning sun With a grey cloud was blurred; And long, in vain, they waited there, Nor cried again, ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... bed, glancing at the clothing laid out for him. He felt tired and disinclined for the exertion of undressing. The shades were up; night quicksilvered the window-panes so that they were like a dark mirror reflecting his face. He inspected his darkened features curiously; the blurred and sombre-tinted ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... over Mary Louise went into the library and, drawing a chair to where the light of the student lamp flooded her book, tried to read. But the words were blurred and her mind was in a sort of chaos. Mamma Bee had summoned Aunt Polly and Uncle Eben to her room, where she was now holding a conference with the faithful colored servants. A strange and subtle atmosphere of unrest pervaded the house; ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... hotter as the sun rose higher in the heavens, and the stranger felt very uncomfortable, but it was not the heat which affected him as much as the terrible network of circumstances which he had woven for himself. It was the harvest he was reaping as the result of one false step, when his brain was blurred and he was somebody besides the elegant gentleman whom people felt it an honor to know. He was himself now, crushed inwardly, but carrying himself just as proudly as if no mental fire were consuming him, making him think seriously more than once of jumping into the river and ending ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... opinion of her own actions, to continue in that hateful excitement; he sees men and women all round him letting their love and their desire trickle through their fingers; he sees Semenoff die, and death also in that atmosphere is blurred and meaningless. Men and women plunge into horrible relationships and constantly excuse themselves. They seek to propitiate society by labouring to give permanence to fleeting pleasures, the accidents of passion and propinquity. Love is rare; physical necessity is common ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... I'll look," said Hugh, resolutely turning to the pages. Lady Tennys leaned weakly against the counter and looked through blurred eyes at the racing lines of ink. Hugh rapidly ran his fingers through the list, passing dozens of passengers they had known. As the finger approached the "R's" it moved more slowly, more tremblingly. "Reed—Reyer—Ridge!" "Hugh Ridge, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A." He grew sick when he saw his ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... have felt as he saw her arranging them so light-heartedly in her pudding-dish that morning. And yet, rather than mar her pleasure, he had choked back the impulse to speak. Yes, that was like him. For a moment they blurred as she looked at them. She checked her inclination to throw them into the stove, to burn them to ashes so that they could work their evil spells no more. Later on, she would do so. But she wanted them ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... indulged in ballooning knows fully well. On a clear summer's day I have been able to see the ground beneath with perfect distinctness from a height of 4,500 feet, yet when the craft had ascended a further two or three hundred feet, the panorama was blurred. A film of haze lies between the balloon and the ground beneath. And the character of this haze is continually changing, so that the aerial observer's task is rendered additionally difficult. Its effects are particularly notice able when one attempts to photograph the view unfolded ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... thing at all: it being all one to have no rule, and one that will warp any way; or amongst various and contrary rules, not to know which is the right. But concerning innate principles, I desire these men to say, whether they can or cannot, by education and custom, be blurred and blotted out; if they cannot, we must find them in all mankind alike, and they must be clear in everybody; and if they may suffer variation from adventitious notions, we must then find them clearest and most perspicuous ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... civility, he disfigured my papers, that no sooner came into his hands, but he fell upon them as a lion rampant, or the cat upon the poor cock in the fable, saying, Tu hodie mihi discerperis—so my papers came home miserably clawed, blotted, and blurred; whole sentences dismembered, and pages scratched out; several leaves omitted which ought to be printed,—shamefully he used my copy; so that before it was carried to the press, he swooped away the second part of the Life wholly from it—in the room of which he shuffled ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... speech, and hot, impatient temper, and it is easy, I think, even at this late date, to distinguish Shakespeare's touches on the traditional portrait. It is for the reader to say whether Shakespeare blurred ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... the only One of whom we are told that He was led up to be tempted. He was the leader of the race for the regaining of the blurred image, the lost mastery and dominion. He Himself bade us pray not to be so tempted. He out-matched the tempter. Any one of us, alone, is clearly out-matched by that tempter. But we may always rest secure in the victory He achieved that day. Only ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... such, none over their members. How, then, is one to look forward with comfort to the establishment of a Labour Government? It will take a readier speech than even Mr. Webb's, a more confident than even Mr. Smillie's to illuminate this smoke-blurred scene whereon we make out every trade union preying upon Mr. George's vitals (which are, unfortunately, for the moment our own vitals), and with a success so disastrously easy as to make any prospects of a return to sane, honest, ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... muttered to himself, "that Pete assembled these robots in a batch and then activated them all at once, probably never living to realize that they're tuned to pick up human brain waves, too. Damn! Damn!" His eyes blurred and he slammed his fist into ...
— Survival Tactics • Al Sevcik
... had sickened. Now the physical effect had gone. But the nausea in passing had been replaced by another sensation, deadlier, equally human, that made her red and hot, blurred her eyes, set her quivering, shook her, put her thoughts on fire, vitriolised her ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... was bounding away in pursuit of his last companion with a winged gallop. It seemed that the wind caught him up and buoyed him from stride to stride, and the cowpunchers with hungry, burning eyes watched without a word until the grey and the chestnut blurred on the horizon and dipped out of view together. The spell was broken in the same instant by a stream of profanity floating up from the rear. It was Lew Hervey ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... is, so to speak, buried in biography; the character and the personality of the man lost in the voluminous testimony of many witnesses. Reading, we note the care and conscientiousness of the writer; we have but a confused and blurred impression of the poet. Although a century has passed since his death, we do not yet see the events of Burns's life in proper perspective. Things trifling in themselves, and of little bearing on his character, have been preserved, ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... little cluster of houses, and the sea of churned-up mire between them and the track. There also appeared to be no station except a big water tank and a rather unsightly shed, about which stood a group of blurred and shapeless figures. It seemed very cold, and Agatha shivered as she felt the raw wind ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... story is short and somewhat blurred. Tish having broken her glasses, Aggie being, as one may say, hors de combat, and I having developed a frightful headache in the dust and bad air, the real meaning of what was occurring did not penetrate to ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... on, Magic came stealing down the blurred highways. Lamps became lanterns, shedding a muffled light, deepening and charging with mystery the darkness beyond. Old friends grew unfamiliar. Where they had stood, fantastic shapes loomed out of the ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... their strange love's sake Rode Balen forth by lawn and lake, By moor and moss and briar and brake, And in his heart their sorrow spake Whose lips were dumb as death, and said Mute words of presage blind and vain As rain-stars blurred and marred by rain To wanderers on a moonless main Where night and day ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... a crowd in the saloon, which had a smoky, blurred look through the open door. Some of the old gambling gear had been uncovered and pushed out from the wall. A faro game was running, with a dozen or more players, at the end of the bar; several poker tables stretched across the gloomy ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... the rifleman looks at when he fires. The eye can be focused accurately upon objects at only one distance at a time; all other objects we see will be more or less blurred and fuzzy looking, depending upon their distance from the object upon which our ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... was of chameleon hue; Lean, fat, tall, short, rich, poor, grave, gay, a blonde and a brunette— Aha, amid this London fog, John Smith, I see you yet; I see you yet, and yet the sight is all so blurred I seem To see you in composite, or as in a waking dream, Which are you, John? I'd like to know, that I might weave a rhyme Appropriate to your character, your politics and clime; So tell me, were you "raised" or "reared"—your ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... candlestick for one candle, which was sufficient for ordinary occasions. The chairs, antique in shape, were covered with tapestry representing the fables of La Fontaine; it was necessary, however, to know that writer well to guess at the subjects, for the faded colors and the figures, blurred by much darning, were difficult ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... and almost impossible, owing to the conditions of technique. You see, to depict horse-stealers in seven hundred lines I must all the time speak and think in their tone and feel in their spirit, otherwise, if I introduce subjectivity, the image becomes blurred and the story will not be as compact as all short stories ought to be. When I write I reckon entirely upon the reader to add for himself the subjective elements that are lacking ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... girl's soft eyes upon him, Kenny felt that he could not be expected to read each word of the letter. He never did that anyhow. He blurred through now with amazing speed, catching enough to gratify and upset him. The letter, reminiscent of his penitential quest for Brian, roused voices that he did not want to hear. Nor did he hear them for long. Joan was holding out the clipping, ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... letters he withdrew and tried to read, but the scraps gave no tangible result, and he was just about to relinquish his search when his eye caught a scrap of bright blue notepaper of a familiar hue. It was half burned, and blurred by the rain, but at the corner he recognised some embossing in dark blue—familiar embossing it was—of part of the ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... murder and its expiation, was the strongest. For by the very freshness of his released memories, it was the days before his flight from the ranch that seemed most recent, and his life with David that was long ago, and blurred in its details as by the passing ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... me when I awaked into the Future, into the Everlasting Night that lapped this world, that I saw near to me, and girdling me all about, a blurred greyness. And presently this, the greyness, would clear and fade from about me, even as a dusky cloud, and I would look out upon a world of darkness, lit here and there with strange sights. And with my waking into that Future, I waked not to ignorance; ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... eyes to look at me in her unseeing gentle way. Her glance was by no means stupid; it beamed out soft and diffuse as the moon beams upon a landscape—quite differently from the scrutinising inspection of the stars. You were drowned in it, and imagined yourself to appear blurred. And yet this same glance when turned upon Christian Falk must have been as efficient as ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... and a "Holland Interior" by Dr. Gessler, Philadelphia. Of her recent exhibition a critic writes: "The pictures are notable for their careful attention to detail of drawing. Architectural features of the rich old Gothic churches are faithfully indicated instead of blurred, and the treatment is almost devotional in tone, so sympathetic is the quality of the work. There is a total absence of the garish coloring which has become so common, the religious subjects being without exception in a minor key, usually soft grays and blues. It is indeed in ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... land of giants; giants have dragged me by the wrists since I was born out of my mother—the giants of circumstance. And you would judge me by my acts! But can you not look within? Can you not understand that evil is hateful to me? Can you not see within me the clear writing of conscience, never blurred by any wilful sophistry, although too often disregarded? Can you not read me for a thing that surely must be common as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of its power, of its generous and native health. There was a strange apathy in his senses, an emotional stillness, as it were, the atrophy of all the passionate elements of his nature. But because of this he was the better poised, the more evenly balanced, the more perceptive. His eyes were not blurred or dimmed by any stress of emotion, his mind worked in a cool quiet, and his forward tread had leisurely decision and grace. He had sunk one part of himself far below the level of activity or sensation, while new resolves, new powers of mind, new designs were set in motion to make his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the teleceiver for reception and waited. In a moment the screen blurred and then an image appeared. ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... retired and pleasant and suitable spot in which to hold a committee meeting. Exactly behind the seat stood an enormous jar of terra-cotta, colored red, and decorated with Greek figures in black silhouette, rather blurred and rubbed off, but still distinguishable. No doubt its original use had been to store water, wine, or olive-oil, but nowadays it was merely an ornament to the garden. A plant pot full of scarlet geraniums rested on its head, and an arbutula twined ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... and climb the barbed wire of morality with equal impunity, and the utmost rigor of punishment had little terror for those whose hardships could scarcely be artificially worsened. The stagger of despair, the stricken, helpless aspect of such people, their gaunt faces and blurred eyes might conceivably be their stock-in-trade, the keys wherewith they unlocked hearts and purses and area-doors. It must be so when the sun was shining and birds were singing across fields not immeasurably ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... half-dozen men seemed to be surrounding him and Juliette, but the drizzling rain blurred every outline. The blackness of the night too had become absolutely dense, and in the distance the cries of the populace ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... pheasants, on dying dolphins in purple seas; and in all the riotous carnival of color on Nature's palette, from shifting glory of summer clouds, to the steady fires of red autumn skies—we find no blot, no break, no blurred abortive passages, until man stepped into creation's story. In the material, physical Universe, the divine rhythm flows on, majestic, serene as when the "morning stars sing together" in the choral of praise to Him, unto whom "all seemed good"; but in the moral and spiritual ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... of a wave-worn voyager's sensations when, a couple of hours later, he demands permission to get out of his delicious little white bed that he may have the pleasure of getting into it again. The evening is cold and raw and the new picture is all blurred and soft and indistinct, and nothing seems plain except the kindly grace of our welcome and the never-before-sufficiently-appreciated delights of space ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... she learned, perhaps unconsciously. Her standard of values began to shift and change. Sometimes the dollar-mark grew blurred in her mind's eye, and shaped itself into letters that spelled such words as "truth" and "honor" and now and then just "kindness." Let us make a likeness of one who hunts the moose or elk in some mighty wood. He sees a little dell, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... will, assented gravely. They moved down the sloping lawn, side by side, Sir Rowland leaning on his cane, bareheaded, his feathered hat tucked under his arm. Before them the river's smooth expanse, swollen and yellow with the recent rains, glowed like a sheet of copper, so that it blurred the sight to look ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... not say the Apostles' Creed with unswerving conscience—to whom the story of the Resurrection was fogged, blurred with a thousand inconsistencies—even she could not dispense with that moment in each day, that moment of abandonment—the flinging of one's burden of questions at the feet of a deity whose identity it ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... the ochre on Blue-nosed Owl was blurred, as his braves concluded their brief harangues; And he dropped a tear on the early bier of our ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 18, 1891 • Various
... Dowager experienced a faint stirring of surprise that she heard no flop such as must attend the violent falling of so fat a body. But the next instant, realizing the purpose of his absurd posture, she shrank back with a faint gasp, and her face was mercifully blurred to his sight once more amid the shadows of her chair. Thus was he spared the look of utter loathing, of unconquerable, irrepressible disgust that leapt into ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... carriage in which the poor stricken mother sat so calmly—not to drop from the seat. Well—all this has blackened Rome to me. I can't think about the Caesars in the old strain of thought—the antique words get muddled and blurred with warm dashes of modern, everyday tears and fresh grave-clay. Rome is spoilt to me—there's the truth. Still, one lives through one's associations when not too strong, and I have arrived at almost enjoying some things—the climate, for instance, ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... field to field, moving blurred and tall in the drizzle, or striding on the crests of rises, lonely and high upon the gray curtain of drifting clouds, as if he had been pacing along the very edge of the universe. He looked at the black earth, at the earth mute ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... growing dark now, and the rolling country through which they passed became rapidly blurred. The white excavations that here and there marked the presence of a trench were like a child's scribbling on a slate, if the occasional glow of a brazier had not told Dennis that those trenches were full of men, all waiting to repulse the great ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... revealed them to us) he has kept his promise, we fall to pitying Shakespeare, the bestower of immortality. In the great temple raised by his genius to his own undying glory, one narrow door opens into a secret, silent crypt, where his image, blurred and indistinct, is hardly discernible through the gloomy atmosphere, heavy and dim as if with sighs and tears. Here is no clew, no issue, and we return to the shrine filled with light and life and warmth and melody; with knowledge and love of man, and worship of God and nature. There is our benefactor ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... which had once more been freighted up those mountain heights for the comfort of its harmonies. Sometimes, when the wind and rain were beating outside, and he was striding up and down the long room within, with only the blurred shapes of mountains and trees outlined through the trailing rain, the feeling of the unreality became so strong that it was hard to believe that somewhere down below, beyond the rain and the woods, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... to what they were talking, but when I heard Clown say "grasshoppers," I cocked my ear instinctively. Clown emphasized, for what reason I do not know the word "grasshopers" so that it would be sure to reach my ear plainly, and he blurred the rest on purpose. I did not move, and kept on listening. "That same old Hotta," "that may be the case...." "Tempura ...... ha, ha, ha ......" "...... incited ......" "...... dango ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... love, and I saw on the leaf that sign with which once or twice in my life I have had a letter sealed,—a round spot where the paper is slightly corrugated, and, if there is writing there, the letters are somewhat faint and blurred. Most of the pages were surrounded with emblematic traceries. It was strange to me at first to see how often she introduced those homelier wild-flowers which we call weeds,—for it seemed there was none of them too humble for her to love, and none too ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... menace, with skeleton forms, and other more really fearful images, overspread and disfigured the walls. I observed that the outlines of these monstrosities were sufficiently distinct, but that the colors seemed faded and blurred, as if from the effects of a damp atmosphere. I now noticed the floor, too, which was of stone. In the centre yawned the circular pit from whose jaws I had escaped; but it was the only one ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... make sure of that and to search for footprints. But those he found were indistinct, blurred partly by the looseness of the sand and partly by the sparse grass that grew along the trail there, because the buggy had turned in a hollow. He went on a couple of rods, and he saw where an automobile had also come to this point and had turned and gone back toward town, or rather, it had ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... close of the afternoon the aspect of the sky seemed to promise that ere long we might hope for a welcome change of weather; the deep, brilliant blue of the unclouded dome became blurred as though it were gradually being overspread by a thin and semi-transparent curtain of mist, which gradually resolved itself into that streaky, feathery appearance called by seamen "mare's-tails"; and a bank of horizontal grey cloud gathered in the western quarter, into which the sun at ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... effete monarchy ruled by a Peerage, looks for its own governing class to the Steerage, Mr. WILLIAM ADAMS subsided impecuniously into plain BILL ADAMS and a book-keepership in dry goods; and was ultimately blurred into BLADAMS and employment as a copyist by Mr. DIBBLE, to whom his experience of spending every cent he had in the world, and getting nothing in the world for it but wrinkles, seemed felicitously legal and almost supernaturally ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... her companion talkative. He stared ahead, as if trying to pierce with his eyes the line of timber that blurred across the landscape. Norah was glad he did not bother her with questions. She had told him all she knew, and now he was content ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... how the large moon dipped and dipped. Soon it would dip below the dim land's rim, and the olive trees would be blurred and twisted shadows ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... which the logic is employed, and, unconsciously to its owners, determines, for the most part, the shape into which their theories will be moulded. Now, De Foe was above the ordinary standard, in so far as he did not, like most of us, see things merely as a blurred and inextricable chaos; but he was below the great imaginative writers in the comparative coldness and dry precision of his mental vision. To him the world was a vast picture, from which all confusion was banished; everything ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... graves. There—spreading to the distance, lay London, with no sun over it, mourning the loss of its daughter, mourning with this family, so dear, the loss of her who was mother and guardian. A hundred thousand spires and houses, blurred in the great grey web of property, lay there like prostrate worshippers before the grave of this, the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... separates the evil from the good, the just from the unjust, the sheep from the goats—that distinction which Jesus marks so clearly in His parable of judgment, and which must never, in our interpretations or philosophizings, be blotted or blurred? Some are life-givers; some are life-destroyers. "The thief cometh not but that he may steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and may ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... the possible presence of anaesthesia during eye-movement is given by a very simple observation. All near objects seen from a fairly rapidly moving car appear fused. No further suggestion of their various contour is distinguishable than blurred streaks of color arranged parallel, in a hazy stream which flows rapidly past toward the rear of the train. Whereas if the eye is kept constantly moving from object to object scarcely a suggestion of this blurred appearance can be detected. The phenomenon is striking, since, ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... pierce the heart, Works into it some glorious design; Which on this under side of life is blurred, Thread over thread in infinite confusion. Or, if we are not made of firmest texture, The work pulls through, or tears an ugly rent, Or gathers up our woof in meshy tangles. This is a world of worn and fretted ends, Knit in a maze of fearful intricacy, Wherein we see no meaning. Nor can we know ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... time went by, she never knew how long, till suddenly a rifle shot rang through the stillness. Benita was able to bear no more. She rushed down the winding passage, and presently, just beyond its mouth, in a blurred and indistinct fashion saw that the two white men were rolling together on the ground, while the Kaffirs sprang round watching for an opportunity to seize one of them. At that moment they succeeded, and Robert rose, dusting his hands ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... of dusk came in at the blurred windows of the room. Pennoyer threw down his pen and tossed his drawing over on the wonderful heap of stuff that hid the table. "It's too dark to work." He lit a pipe and walked about, stretching his shoulders like a man ...
— The Third Violet • Stephen Crane
... the stunning concussion shock of a blaster beam passing two inches overhead. His vision blurred and there was a hideous roaring in his ears. She was still holding to him for comfort and it seemed to him that was wrong—he should be clinging ...
— —And Devious the Line of Duty • Tom Godwin
... afternoon and close to the edge of the foothills, Cheyenne lost the tracks. He spent over an hour finding them again. Bartley could discern nothing definite, even when Cheyenne pointed to a queer, blurred patch ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... with the snow and the sleet which had been falling all the time she had been in the theatre. She saw blurred lights flash past, and realised that the taxi was going at a good pace. She rubbed the windows and tried to look out after a while. Then she endeavoured to lower one, but without success. Suddenly she jumped up and tapped furiously at the window to attract the driver's ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... nerveless finger, touched the paper as if to make sure that it was real. Then, very slowly, she rose from her chair and crossing the room, stood in the doorway and gazed toward the notch in the hills until hot tears welled into her eyes and blurred the distant skyline. The next moment she was upon her bunk, where she lay shaken between fits of sobbing and hysterical laughter. She drew the glove, with its fringed gauntlet and its gaudily embroidered horseshoe from her shirt front and ran ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx |
