"Blur" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one, was that it no longer was only in front of me but was all around me—stretching away on every side of the wreck on which I was standing, and growing fainter and fainter as the haze shut down thick upon it until it vanished softly into the golden blur. ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... low and the west was blazing with scarlet and gold. Its reflection was shot back in ruddy patches by the distant pools which lay amid the great Grimpen Mire. There were the two towers of Baskerville Hall, and there a distant blur of smoke which marked the village of Grimpen. Between the two, behind the hill, was the house of the Stapletons. All was sweet and mellow and peaceful in the golden evening light, and yet as I looked at them my soul shared none of the peace of nature but quivered ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... 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 on the ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... till shame my virtues blur, Till such an ending seem not loss, but gain! Yet o'er my heart there creeps a saddening pain, To hear them cry ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... 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 bread appeared ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... thrown golden dust in my eyes, and I am seeing things all wrong. We have anchored for the night.... I am watching the misty green blur, which is all that is left to me of India, grow more and more indistinct as darkness falls. ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... and mingled with her blood the warm undercurrent of a dream. The dream had come to her many springs ago; and as Flossie grew plumper and rosier it grew plump and rosy too. To be married (to a person hitherto unspecified in fancy, whose features remained a blur or a blank), to be the mistress of a dear little house (the house stood out very clear in Flossie's fancy), and the mother of a dear little girl (a figure ever present to her, complete in socks and shoes and all the delicious details of its dress). Compared ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... took a course like a husky; location was a sixth sense to him; yet I found his tracks up there, winding aimlessly. It had stopped snowing then, but the first impressions were nearly filled. In a little while I noticed the spaces were shorter between the prints of the left shoe; they made a dip and blur. Then I came into a parallel trail, and these tracks were clear, made since the snowstorm, but there was the same favoring of the left foot. He was traveling in a circle. Sometimes in unsheltered ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... Maya pushed the hat off her face and stared with exotically slanted black eyes at the shining blur of the dome hundreds of feet above her. She sat up, hugging her knees ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... good-bye. Your feet are cold, and the hands are cold, and the lips are cold, and they take a small mirror and they put it over your mouth to see if there is any breathing, and that mirror is taken away without a single blur upon it; and they whisper through the room: "She is gone." And then the door of the body opens and the soul flashes out. Make room for ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... reaching the end of the track the operator moves the front rudder, and the machine lifts from the rail like a kite supported by the pressure of the air underneath it. The ground under you is at first a perfect blur, but as you rise the objects become clearer. At a height of 100 feet you feel hardly any motion at all, except for the wind which strikes your face. If you did not take the precaution to fasten your hat before starting, you have probably lost it by ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright
... than ever at Sloane Square station. Through the still, thick blur, men groped in and out; women, very few, grasped their reticules to their bosoms and handkerchiefs to their mouths; crowned with the weird excrescence of the driver, haloed by a vague glow of lamp-light that seemed to drown in vapour before it reached the pavement, cabs loomed dim-shaped ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... back-ground is generally 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 paper and ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... weights. A little later a marriage procession would strike into the Grand Trunk with music and shoutings, and a smell of marigold and jasmine stronger even than the reek of the dust. One could see the bride's litter, a blur of red and tinsel, staggering through the haze, while the bridegroom's bewreathed pony turned aside to snatch a mouthful from a passing fodder-cart. Then Kim would join the Kentish-fire of good wishes and bad jokes, wishing the ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... 'Lieutenant 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
... morning, he suddenly became conscious that she was approaching. It seemed that she was looking directly at him, and was about to speak. His heart thumped like a trip-hammer, his cheeks burned, and a blur came over his eyes, for he was diffident in ladies' presence. Therefore he stood before her the picture of confusion, with a big boot poised in one hand, and the polishing-brush in the other. With the instincts of a gentleman, however, he made an awkward ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... north, And reached a spot whence three close lanes led down, Beneath thick trees and hedgerows winding forth Like deep brook channels, deep and dark and lown: The air above was wan with misty light, 5 The dull grey south showed one vague blur ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... of waving wheat And leagues of golden corn The fragrance of the wild-rose bloom And elder-flower is borne; But earth's appealing loveliness We do but half surmise, For oh, the blur of battle-fields Is ever ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... would have been had it passed in ordinary course through the post-office. Letters in the post-office are hurried quickly through the operation of stamping, so that one passing over the other while the stamping ink is still moist, will to some extent blot and blur that with which it has come in contact. He will produce some dozens taken at random, and will show that with them all such has been the case. This blotting, this smudging, is very slight, but it exists; it is always there. He will tell you that this envelope has been stamped as ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... found a long stretch of white-clad country before them. A few farms could be seen in the far distance, but otherwise there was no sign of life on the wide expanse. It seemed to Peggy and Sally that the highway lay over vast snow fields, and the glare of the sunlight on the snow began to blur and blind them. ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... never do," she told herself at last, after standing some moments at the window looking across at the peak through a blur of tears,—"I must brace up and comfort Elsie." But Elsie was not to be comforted all at once, and the wheels of that ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... ambitious nor envious to carp at matters of higher learning than matters of heraldry, which I profess: that is the slipper, wherein I know a slip when I find it. But see your cunning; you can, with the blur of your pen, dipped in copperas and gall, make me learned and unlearned; nay, you can almost change my sex, and make me a whore, like Leontion; and, taking your silver pen again, make ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... material, too, includes much that is of the nature of self-revelation, to be gleaned from familiar letters, as well as from his own history of his time. Yet, after all that has been brought together, Knox remains to many observers a mere hard outline, while to others he is almost an enigma—a blur, bright or black, upon ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... scorched by impatience, then chilled by an indefinable foreboding, just as her father had been. Putting on a figured veil to blur her blush of shame, she slipped away to visit the soothsayers that fashionable women patronized. In a shadowy room hung with Oriental curtains, the shrewd crystal gazer informed her that all would soon be well. "A great love was ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... 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
... now, since I have discovered what some of them believe to be the ordinary waking experience of one who is both deaf and blind. They think that I can know very little about objects even a few feet beyond the reach of my arms. Everything outside of myself, according to them, is a hazy blur. Trees, mountains, cities, the ocean, even the house I live in are but fairy fabrications, misty unrealities. Therefore it is assumed that my dreams should have peculiar interest for the man of science. In some undefined way it is expected that they should reveal the world I dwell in ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... office of the New York Evening Sentinel he had been wont three months before to sit at a long green table fitting words about the yachts of others to the dreary music of his typewriter, the while vaguely conscious of a blur of eight telephone bells, and the sound of voices used merely to communicate thought and not to please the ear. In the last three months he had sometimes remembered that black day when from his high window he had looked toward the harbour and glimpsed a trim craft of white ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... had happened after her return to Bertram was a blur now. There were hasty talks, Bertram defining for her her future position, one of dignity it must be—he insisted on that; Hugh perfectly understood her wish for the present, quite fell in with it; but, eventually, she must take her place in her husband's home ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... and bright greens, yellows and pinks, positive discords and absolute antagonisms of tint side by side, yet without jarring the eye. Green all round, the trees and hedges; blue overhead, the sky; purple and gold westward, where the sun sinks. No part of this grass can be represented by a blur or broad streak of colour, for it is not made up of broad streaks. It is composed of innumerable items of grass blade and flower, each in itself coloured and different from its neighbour. Not one of these must be slurred over if you wish to get ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... ship; every day Thorstan expected the snow. Instead of that, after a few days of sunny weather, the wind dropped in a clear sky; it began to freeze, and then came the white blanket to cling about sheets and spars, and hold them close, a blur drifting upon a sea like oil. Gudrid sat like a ghost in the after deckhouse, nursing her baby and trying to keep it warm. It did not thrive and could not be expected to thrive. She was sure it would die. And so it did—died in ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... as I came back, covered with green branches and flowers. They went by with a cheer—that cheer which sounds like a cheer sometimes, and sometimes, when two trains pass on adjoining tracks so fast that you only catch a blur of faces, like the ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... further grace of art. Makers of tiny slippers and such dainty bootlets as show forth and enhance the separate beauty of each inch of outline of rounded ankle, arched instep, and slender length of foot, shall lend their help. And if envious Time have something done to blur the bloom upon the cheek, or blot the clear transparent purity of skin,—sunt certa piacula,—there are not wanting means for helping a mortal Diva to some of the prerogatives of immortality ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... ever suffer me to leave the hut alive? And yet, so sweet is human life, and so dear a respite, be it ever so short a one, that when that murderous hand was taken from my chin I heard a sudden chiming of little bells, and the lamp blazed up into a strange fantastic blur. It was but for a moment, and then my mind was clear again, and I was looking up at the strange gaunt face ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... subsequent universal value, the destruction of that local complexion was indispensable; that the corruptions inseparable from viva voce communication and imperfect education were the means adopted by the Creator to blur the details of the ideal, and give it that breadth which could not be otherwise obtainable—and that thus the value of the ideal was indefinitely enhanced, and DESIGNEDLY ENHANCED, alike by the waste ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... common sewer; Cloacina; dust hole. sty, pigsty, lair, den, Augean stable[obs3], sink of corruption; slum, rookery. V. be unclean, become unclean &c. Adj.; rot, putrefy, ferment, fester, rankle, reek; stink &c. 401; mold, molder; go bad &c. adj. render unclean &c. adj.; dirt, dirty; daub, blot, blur, smudge, smutch[obs3], soil, smoke, tarnish, slaver, spot, smear; smirch; begrease[obs3];.dabble, drabble[obs3], draggle, daggle[obs3]; spatter, slubber; besmear &c., bemire, beslime[obs3], begrime, befoul; splash, stain, distain[obs3], maculate, sully, pollute, defile, debase, contaminate, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... think that he permitted idle paddles because a wind would do the work, you know not the ways of the great explorer. He bade us ply the faster, till the canoe sped between earth and sky like an arrow shot on the level. The shore-line became a blur. Clumps of juniper and pine marched abreast, halted the length of time an eye could rest, and wheeled away. The swift current raced to meet us. The canoe jumped to mount the glossy waves raised by the beam wind. An upward tilt of her prow, and we had skimmed the swell like a winged thing. And all ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... in. She felt inclined for a snooze, but was afraid it would not look well. While hesitating she ceased speaking, and both women fell asleep under the shade of their parasols. It was the shallow, glassy sleep of the open air, through which they divined easily the great blur that ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... by distant acquaintances and even by persons hardly known to me by sight, who congratulated me on the Emperor's public championing of me against my powerful Sabine neighbors, I felt my strength ebbing and sometimes saw a gray blur between my eyes and ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... writings than to any other relics of ancient literature. Ideas grow and change, yet each generation tries to find its own ideas reflected in the sacred pages of their early prophets, and, in addition to the ordinary influences which blur and obscure the sharp features of old words, artificial influences are here at work distorting the natural expression of words which have been invested with a sacred authority. Passages in the Veda or Zend-Avesta which do not bear on religious or philosophical doctrines are generally explained simply ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... to come again, and had gone back to his calendar to count the nights until the next meeting. Ever since he had left home, he had longed with a longing that was like hunger for the companionship of young people such as he had known at home. There was a blur over one of the dates, the little square that marked the twenty-fifth of December. It was a red-letter day on the calendar, but in Alec's bare little room a holiday that dragged its dismal length out toward dark, ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... boughs, and 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 ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... Spokes (Fig. 143).—Place a design like this on the gramophone and let it turn at high speed. The radial lines seem but a blur. Now punch a hole one-eighth of an inch in diameter in a piece of blackened card, and, standing well away from the gramophone, apply your eye to the hole and move the card quickly to and fro. The extreme briefness of the glimpses obtained of the moving lines seems to rob ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... yet she was certain that it was not the woman's. A blur of voices drifted up to her, the dejected feminine tone and a thin querulous demand, surprise. Taou Yuen turned cold as stone: the sensation of oppressive danger increased until it seemed as if she, and not Nettie Vollar, were strangling. There was a profound stillness, then a shuffling ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... little dry-goods box full of children was a small, vague blur, a little darker than the darkness. The children slept the profound sleep of childhood and childhood's unbelonging toil. Sleep was smoothing Stefana's roughened little nerves with gentle hand and fortifying her courage for yet more strenuous toils ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... easy," murmured the agent. "You get confused. It's a sort of blur, and when you come to put it down, little things that aren't really important come ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... suddenly, when the Major was a blur in a cloud of dust and the horsemen were specks in the distance, "this looks like home to me somehow. There ought to be great sheep feed over there in the foothills and summer range in the mountains. What do you ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... there, listenin' gawpy, with my eyes beginnin' to blur. It's Zenobia, you might know, who notices first. She steps over and gathers me in motherly. Not that I needs it, as I know of, but—well, it was kind of good to feel her ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... as an Italian garden; the only contrasts were those of one elegance with another; horses were not to be seen, except occasionally in the distance when under their riders they shot past some dark background a flitting blur of primary colours with a rumble of muffled thunder; ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... month of his junior year in high school Carl grew more discontented. He let the lines of his Cicero fade into a gray blur that confounded Cicero's blatant virtue and Cataline's treachery, while he pictured himself tramping with snow-shoes and a mackinaw coat into the snowy solemnities of the northern Minnesota tamarack swamps. Much of his discontent was caused by his learned preceptors. The teachers for ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... enough in the light of the overheard conversation at the National Hotel. The men who wanted Mr. Bell's mine had waited till he had located it before striking their first blow. What would their next be? Peggy's pulses throbbed and the grove seemed to blur for an instant. But the next moment she was mistress of herself again. Clearly there was only one thing to do. Lay the ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... confusion of sounds that they make, wherein 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
... developed the fact that the imprint had been only recently made. Within the hour,—unless Maitland were indeed mad or dreaming,—a woman had stood by that desk and rested a hand, palm down, upon it; not yet had the dust had time to settle and blur the sharp outlines. ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... never fainted in her life. It was absurd, but the room was swimming now in a dim blur. Again she gripped the table and set her teeth. She simply would not give up. Why should she leap to the worst possible explanation of the jewels? The hatred of old Ella for Jim and the furious antagonism of Jane Anderson had poisoned ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... A blur of snow swept between boat and shore; when it had passed the former was all but indistinguishable. From a full heart Quain blasphemed fluently.... "But if she holds as she stands," he amended quickly, his indomitable spirit fostering the forlorn hope, "she'll ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... saw nothing but a blur, but she managed to say, "You must be glad! Come and see my little girl, she is very much ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... tell me the rest, Beth," he said quickly, looking down into the pale blur which was ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... top like the arm of a bracket. On the hills beyond can just be made out the woods of Fricourt behind the German line. They are in the background behind Albert church tower. The white ruins of Fricourt may be the blur in the background south of them. We shall ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... earnestly all up and down the wonderful stretch of country that lay along the Wall from north to south. She could see the tiny dots that went for the different homesteads, scattered here and there. Up at the head there lay, hard against the frowning hills, the squat, wide blur that was Courtrey's Stronghold. Her lips ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... leave ill alone! Who tries to mend his wife succeeds As he who knows not what he needs. He much affronts a worth as high As his, and that equality Of spirits in which abide the grace And joy of her subjected place; And does the still growth check and blur Of contraries, confusing her Who better knows what he desires Than he, and to that mark aspires With perfect zeal, and a deep wit Which nothing helps but trusting it. So, loyally o'erlooking all In which love's ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... careful!" I muttered, picking it up, and noticing the great blur it left on the page. "The sheets ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... came to me through picture-books. I wept tenderly over the endangered eyes of Prince Arthur, yet I put out the eyes of many kings, princes, and governors who incurred my displeasure, scratching them with pins till only a white blur remained ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... the third day, Pete was taken to the operating room and another examination made. The X-ray showed a curious blur near the right side of the spine. To extract the bullet would be a difficult and savage operation, an operation which the surgeon thought his patient in his present weakened condition could not stand. Pete lay in a heavy ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... a grey and heavy day, the country was exactly as he remembered it; indeed he recalled it far more vividly in his dream than he had done in memory. The little town stood on a level flat as bare as the hand, not even a willow near it; only in the far distance, a copse lay, a dark blur on the very edge of the horizon. A few paces beyond the last market garden stood a tavern, a big tavern, which had always aroused in him a feeling of aversion, even of fear, when he walked by it with his father. There was always a crowd there, always shouting, laughter and abuse, hideous ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... a block on 'em!" cried Bill with enthusiasm. Jim could just make out a dark blur in the fog ahead where the pursued hack was galloping to some unknown destination. At the sight all the fierce excitement of the chase came over Jim. He must not let that Mexican escape this time. It meant everything to get a hold of him. ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... the low soft sky; some late golden-rod blazed along the edge of the meadow among the purple asters, and a single stalk of cardinal flowers flashed out beside the lichen-covered wall; but all the rest of the world was a blur of yellow and gray. Helen sat down on a stone, and listened to the small wood sounds around her. A beech leaf, twisted like the keel of a fantastic boat, came pattering down on the dead leaves; a bird stirred in the ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... taking on two wheels instead of four the hairpin mountain turns. Now I am perfectly willing to travel as fast as any one, if necessity demands it, but to tear through a region as beautiful as Venetia at sixty miles an hour, with the incomparable landscape whirling past in a confused blur, like a motion-picture film which is being run too fast because the operator is in a hurry to get home, seems to me as unintelligent as it is unnecessary. Like all Italian drivers, moreover, our chauffeur insisted on keeping his cut-out wide open, ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... multitude suddenly pour forward. It looked to him in the blur and the smoke like an avalanche, and in truth it was a human avalanche, a far greater force of the South than they expected to meet there. Directly in front of the Union column stood the Stonewall Brigade, and all the chosen veterans of Stonewall ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... peculiarities gave it the name. Its characteristics made it easy to read even in the dim light of a church or by the failing eyes of the aged. This form of type, however, was only suitable for large pages. When reduced in size it became very difficult to read, being an almost indistinguishable blur on ...
— The Uses of Italic - A Primer of Information Regarding the Origin and Uses of Italic Letters • Frederick W. Hamilton
... There were at least two score of them, laid in a triple bank. Dials to record the passing minutes, hours, days; the years, the centuries! Larry stared at the small whirring pointers. Some were a blur of swift whirling movement—the hours and days. Tina showed Larry how to read them. The cage was passing through the year 1880. In a few moments of Larry's consciousness it was 1799. Then 1793. The infant American nation was here now. But with the cage retrograding, ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... passed the detested animals, thankful that the trail permitted them to ride by at a distance sufficient to blur the most unsavory details, even Big Medicine gave over his deliberate ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... seemed very harsh. Still, it was not a fog to-day. A dense haze, gray and tinged ruddy, lay between the houses, sometimes blowing with a little wet kiss against the face. Mrs. Wilton's hair and eyelashes and her furs were powdered with tiny drops. But there was nothing in the weather to blur the sight; she could see the faces of people some distance off and read the ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... sense of loss was merely a blur. The revelation he had just had of the mad lust for money which had begun to possess all classes was yet so fresh and startling he could form no adequate ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... house, walking with bowed head out of Sequoia, up the abandoned and decaying skid-road through the second-growth redwoods to the dark green blur that marked the old timber. It was May, and Nature was renewing herself, for spring comes late in Humboldt County. From an alder thicket a pompous cock grouse boomed intermittently; the valley quail, in pairs, were busy about their household affairs; from ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... observation—never left the shelter of the bushes. He had all the skill of the old forest runners, because his footsteps made no sound as he passed and he knew how to keep his figure always in the shadows until it became a common blur ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... shrubberies ran silently. Dimly he made out the garden lying at attention, the flower-beds like folded hands upon its breast; and further off, the big untidy elms in pools of deeper shadow, their outlines blurred as dreams blur the mind. Yet, though he could detect no slightest movement, he was keenly aware that other things beside the stars were looking at him. The night was full of carefully- screened eyes, all fixed upon him. Framed in the lighted ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... 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 ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... snow he began the ascent, dragging himself up by the 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 ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... more letters from bark, and, covering the smooth surface with ink, pressed them upon parchment, thus getting a better impression, though still blurred and imperfect. He then cut letters from wood instead of bark, and managed to invent himself a better and thicker ink, which did not blur the page. Next, he cut letters from lead, and then from pewter. Every hour was absorbed in the work of making possible the art of printing. His simple-minded neighbors thought he had lost his mind, ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... foot of earth to see. It was just naturally covered with snow,' says the conductor standing in the rear car of the Great Northern train. He speaks as though the snow had hidden something priceless. Here is the view: One railway track and a line of staggering telegraph poles ending in a dot and a blur on the horizon. To the left and right, a sweep as it were of the sea, one huge plain of corn land waiting for the spring, dotted at rare intervals with wooden farmhouses, patent self-reapers and binders almost as big as the houses, ricks left over from last year's ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... room whirled about Aimee.... In the candle light, leaping in the rush of conflict, she saw the bey and the black, and their distorted shadows in a goblin blur.... And beneath them she saw Ryder, helpless, his hands and feet pinioned.... With the madness of despair she rushed forward, but ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... extreme leisure at the rails. He stuck his hands into his pockets and his head out at the very small train. His bleached blue eyes shut to slits as he watched the rear car in its smoke-blur ooze away westward among the mounded bluffs. "Lucky it's out of range," I thought. But now Scipio ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... got her?" I said. For I'd caught sight of the Diana in passing, against the bluish blur of an old verdure—just the background for her poised loveliness. Only I rather wondered why she wasn't in ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... he, too, dropped to the ground, and, waiting only until he could follow without being detected, set out after the tall figure, which was by that time scarcely more than an indistinct and retreating blur in ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... him after 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 will, and ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... Muggleton against the Dingley Dellers, and that at the Swan—otherwise the Blue Lion—the Pickwick fellowship shared the conviviality of the rival teams, until Mr. Snodgrass's notes of the evening's transactions faded away into a blur in which there was an indistinct reference to "broiled bones" and "cold without". The stately ruins of a Benedictine Abbey, founded by Bishop Gundulf, give to the town an attraction of ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... dreamed not. He would sit him down Thinking to work his problems as of old, And find the star he thought so plain a blur, The columned figures labyrinthine wilds Without my comment, blind and senseless scrawls That vexed him with their riddles; he would strive And struggle for a while, and then his eye Would lose its light, and over all his mind The cold gray mist would settle; and erelong The darkness ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... arrows at the great statue, which they used as a target, and in a few hours the work of sixteen years was utterly destroyed. It is sadder still to tell the fate of Leonardo's fresco, the greatest picture perhaps that ever was painted. Dampness lurked in the wall and began to dim and blur the colours. The careless monks cut a door through the very centre of the picture, and, later on, when Napoleon's soldiers entered Milan, they used the refectory as a stable, and amused themselves by throwing stones ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... the blur of her vision on his pony, halted, and swung down in front of the stable across the street. The horse staggered as the weight came out of the stirrup and that made Marianne watch with a keener interest, for she had seen a great deal of merciless riding since she came West and it always angered ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... This drive was to have been a glorious experience. She had seen Central Park more than once, and had walked there, miserable in her loneliness. Now, though she looked out of the window, it was to let Beverley feel that she was not being stared at. The girl saw only a blur of colour, as if a kaleidoscope ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... my staggering consciousness could realize was an immensity, an immeasurable uprearing that brought with it the same throat-gripping vertigo as comes from gazing downward from some great height—then a blur of white faces—intolerable shinings of hundreds upon thousands of eyes. Huge, incredibly huge, a colossal amphitheatre of jet, a stupendous semi-circle, held within its mighty arc the ivory platform on ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... silent, or made little signs to one another as they watched the fire. Meanwhile the mother considered the papers, now with a gleam of anger in her eyes, as she read, and now with a momentary blur of tear-dimmed vision. Most of the letters she threw at once on the fire. They writhed a moment like living creatures, and of a sudden blazed out as if tormented into sudden confession of the passions of years gone by; then they fell away to black unmemoried ...
— Mr. Kris Kringle - A Christmas Tale • S. Weir Mitchell
... the place was Midway Island; the point of view the very spot at which I had landed with the captain for the first time, and from which I had re-embarked the day before we sailed. I had already been gazing for some seconds before my attention was arrested by a blur on the sea-line, and, stooping to look, I recognised the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... these rural charmers. They think New York is folded up and put away in camphor when they leave, and only taken out again when they pay their next visit. The notion that anything could possibly have happened since he was last in our midst to blur the memory of that happy evening had not occurred to Mr Ferris. I suppose he was so accustomed to dating things from 'when I was in New York' that he thought everybody else must ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... poor little thing!" and instantly the step-mother's countenance changed. "Janice, we don't know. Poor Hopewell is 'most worried to death. Sometimes it seems as though there was a blur over the child's eyes. And she has never got over her old habit of shutting her eyes and seeing with her ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... Throws out clear tokens of reviving fire:" But Virgil had bereav'd us of himself, Virgil, my best-lov'd father; Virgil, he To whom I gave me up for safety: nor, All, our prime mother lost, avail'd to save My undew'd cheeks from blur of soiling tears. ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... fur slur tart cart bur furl star turf first curl gird jerk lard fern bird dart firm scar card char spar hurl lark hurt part arch turn blur purr pert spur hard barn darn carp herd dark burn term hark yard start shirt bark yarn harp sharp clerk skirt chirp park spark shark mark spurt third parch smart churn perch harm charm starch march ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... nor did a house ever occur in any of my dreams. Nor, for that matter, did any of my human kind ever break through the wall of my sleep. I, who had seen trees only in parks and illustrated books, wandered in my sleep through interminable forests. And further, these dream trees were not a mere blur on my vision. They were sharp and distinct. I was on terms of practised intimacy with them. I saw every branch and twig; I saw and ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... the nationality of the standard, which, hardly visible at that distance, was only discernible as a blur upon the blue of the otherwise immaculate sky. The castle undoubtedly commanded that highway on the far side of the wood along which they must pass. Carter had descended into the road and was eagerly adjusting the focus for a ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... excusing this, and no resisting it. A man might blur ten sides of paper in attempting a defence of it against a critic who should be laughter-proof. The quibble in itself is not considerable. It is only a new turn given, by a little false pronunciation, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... in a blur of leaping hostile beams. Silent battle of lights! Darkness bombs down at the ship struggling to bar our camp search-ray. The Benson radiance-rays from our passing platforms curving down to mingle with the confusion. The electronic ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... small soft creases. Two big red roses drooped from her bodice. She wore a garden-hat, of white straw, with a big daring rose-red bow, under which the dense meshes of her hair, warmly dark, dimly bright, shimmered in a blur of ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... so rare that the ability to write them has erroneously been called "a gift." It is not. Any one of educated intelligence can write his ideas; provided he has clear, definite thought-images in his own mind. But cloudy thinking reflects only a blur on paper. ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... was all she said, and it must have been the case, for that very night as soon as his head had touched the pillow he was off again, as he hadn't been since Ellen fell ill, to the House of the Shining Walls. It rose stately against a blur of leafless woods and crocus-coloured sky. The garden before it was all full of spring bulbs and the scent of daffodils. The Princess came walking in it as before, but she was no Princess now, merely a woman with her dark hair brushed ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... then, before us, and I dare not blur the clear distinction which Jesus Christ draws. I listen to Him, and accept His word, and I press upon you, dear brethren, that the main thing about a road is, after all, where it leads us; and I ask you to remember that your ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... sensations and experiences, as he moved through the solemn gloom and the empty vastness of the night, were new and strange to him. At intervals he heard voices approach, pass by, and fade into silence; and as he saw nothing more of the bodies they belonged to than a sort of formless drifting blur, there was something spectral and uncanny about it all that made him shudder. Occasionally he caught the twinkle of a light—always far away, apparently—almost in another world; if he heard the tinkle of a sheep's bell, it was vague, distant, indistinct; the muffled lowing of the herds floated to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain |
