"Blurred" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the raft was heard a woman's shrill laugh, followed by the deeper laugh of a man. Their figures, blurred by the mist, were nearly invisible to Sergei, who, however, watched them curiously. The man appeared as a tall figure, standing with legs wide apart, holding a pole, and half turned toward a shorter woman's ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... the regiment was brought to a halt and was stretched along the edge of a wide potato field, which the soldiers had never seen before. It was drizzling with sickening persistence, and the dark-blue distances, mildly sloping and mournful, were blurred in the haze of the rain. On both sides, as far as eye could reach, ranks of grey officers and soldiers were wretchedly soaking in the rain. Water was dripping from their sullen faces and it looked ...
— The Shield • Various
... Mollie bent eagerly over it. It was Ruth's missing picture of the library at the Court—one of the longtime exposures which she had taken on the eventful morning when the desk had been opened in the squire's absence. The nearer part of the interior was clear and distinct, but the further half was blurred as if something had moved while the plate was still exposed, while leaning over the open desk was a man's figure, dim and blurred indeed, but recognisable in a flash as that of ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... that Mrs Olliver and six men had wrung her hand with varying degrees of vigour, each adding a characteristic tribute of thanks and praise, her cheeks were on fire; and a mist, which she tried vainly to dispel, blurred her vision. ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... a match stub out into the dust of the street, tilted his small Stetson at an angle over his eyes, went over to the horses, and looked at their brands which had been hidden from him. One was a Flying U, and the other bore a blurred monogram which he did not trouble to decipher. He turned on his heels and went ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... you marvelled at their stablishment; this morning they will be floating above the world. One week the clear-cut beauty of their lines and curves gladdens your heart; the next, a mocking mystery of soft blurred battlements will tease your vision. Such shifting sorcery is never stale. Light, shade, and atmosphere play such fantastic tricks with Pau's fair heritage that the grey town, curled comfortably in the sunshine upon her plateau's ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... fancied that his face 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 ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... nighting-place; yesterday it had been reported six hours distant. High towering on our left (north) rose three huge buttresses of the Girgir. In front stood a marvellous background of domes and arches, cones and ninepins, all decayed Hism, blurred and broken by the morning mist, which could hardly be called a fog; and forming a perspective of a dozen distances. Now they curve from north-east to south-west in a kind of scorpion's tail, with detached vertebrae torn and wasted by the adjacent plutonic outcrops; and ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... York; 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 ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... with a stiff tongue, but he gave me a friendly push, and I tumbled like a log on to the bedclothes. As soon as my head felt the pillow the fresh colouring of his face appeared blurred, and an arm, mistily large, was extended to put out the light of the lamp screwed to ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... this respect. By moving the lens backward and forward we finally strike a position where the principal image to be photographed will appear sharp and clear. The camera is then in focus, but we shall discover that other objects more in the background or foreground will appear blurred and confused. Often it is desirable to have a blurred or "fuzzy" background, but if we desire to bring the indistinct objects in focus we must "stop down" our lens first by trying the No. 8 stop, and if this does not accomplish the results the No. 16, and so on until we get what we ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... Poynsett insisted that Rosamond should not stay behind on her account; and, glad to appease the restlessness of anxiety, out went the ladies, to find the best view of the town,—usually a white object in the distance, but now blurred by smoke thick and black in the daylight, and now and then ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of his life was given up to developing this great idea. He cut 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. ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... followed Rebecca into the kitchen. The frock was quite dry, and in truth it had been helped a little by aunt Sarah's ministrations; but the colors had run in the rubbing, the pattern was blurred, and there were muddy streaks here and there. As a last resort, it was carefully smoothed with a warm iron, and Rebecca was urged to attire herself, that they might see if the spots showed as much when it ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... aside and heaped branches against the log, he rekindled the fire. In the light which it cast he could see the blurred trail of Spurling, where he had crawled to and from the cabin; also he could see the tracks which the slayer's snowshoes had left as he strode away through the forest following the portage. He stooped and examined them. By so doing he learnt a new fact—that ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... remained on the road looking down at her. He did not offer to approach her, neither did he make any other movement or gesture. Flora de Barral told me all this. She could see him through her tears, blurred to a mere shadow on the white road, and then again becoming more distinct, but always absolutely still and as if lost in thought before a strange phenomenon which demanded ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... blurred picture of Captain Ross high up on the bridge, peering into the moving blackness. How strange that there should be hidden in the convolutions of a man's brain an intelligence that laid bare the pretences of that ravenous demon without. Each of the ship's officers, the commander ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... he undertakes to do more than sketch his environment in the blurred large method corresponding to ordinary passing impressions—is the rhetorical sublime of this mountain lake ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... it is such a nuisance to move that they don't mean to pack it this time at all. There are a lot of names in the back and some awfully homely pictures. I rubbed my finger on one and it smooched the nose clear off and blurred both eyes, but he wasn't good looking anyway. It isn't much worse now. On one page it says 'Births,' and on another 'Deaths,' ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... elephants and elephant-riders, 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, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... immediately to his imitation of Archimedes, only relaxing the intensity of his attention to the text (which blurred into jargon before his fixed gaze) when he heard that light laugh again. He pursed his lips, looked up at the ceiling as if slightly puzzled by some profound question beyond the reach of womankind; ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... MacRae's eyes blurred unexpectedly. What a damned shame things had to be the way they were. Behind this girl, who was in herself lovely and desirable as a woman should be, loomed the pudgy figure of her father, ruthless, vindictively unjust. Gower hadn't struck at him ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... 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, and he fell with ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... the driveway and under the Memorial Arch, old Dan, sympathizing with them, and finding he could make the express by a safe margin, allowing the jitney to flutter along at reduced speed. From its top, T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., his vision blurred with tears, gazed back with his class-mates. He saw the campus, its grass green, with stately old elms bordering the walks, and the golden June sunshine bathing everything in a soft radiance. He beheld the college buildings—the Gym., ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... 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
... character is in the skulls, those of the larger pard being longer and more pointed, with a ridge running along the occiput, much developed for the attachment of the muscles, whereas the smaller pard has not only a rougher coat, the spots being more blurred, but it is comparatively a more squat built animal, with a rounder skull without the decided occipital ridge. There is a mass of evidence on the point of distinctness—Sir Walter Elliot, Horsfield, Hodgson, Sir Samuel Baker, Johnson (author of 'Field Sports in ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... of the ride. 'Twas all a sort of constant changin' sameness. I remember passin' a blurred life-savin' station, with three—or maybe thirty—blurred men jumpin' and laughin' and hollerin'. I found out afterwards that they'd been on the lookout for the bombshell for half an hour. Billings had told around town what he was goin' to do to me, and ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... 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 was not of ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... undersleeves of sheer white gathered at the wrist. The wide lace collar circled a throat scarcely less white, and altogether made a picture worth study, though Matthew Loring's view of it was rather blurred because of the failure of vision which he denied whenever opportunity offered; next to paralysis there was nothing he dreaded so much as blindness, and even to Delaven he ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... cabin that Dan Treu stooped quickly and brought the lantern close to a blurred outline in a bit of soft earth close to a growth of cactus. He looked at it long and intently and when he straightened himself his heavy, rather expressionless ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... smoked and talked with them until improper hours of the morning, known them well enough to borrow their money, even their razors, and parted from them with never a pang. But when our ship abandoned those boys to the unclean land behind them, I could see them only in a blurred and misty group. We raised our hats to them and tried to cheer, but it was more of a salute than a cheer. I had never seen them before, I shall never meet them again—we had just burned signals as our ships passed in the night—and yet, I must always consider ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... Frenchman. The right side of Aubin's face was rather startlingly handsome in its Greek perfection. It was like a profile chiselled. The left side was another face—the same, and yet not the same. It was as though you saw the left side out of drawing, or blurred, or out of focus. It puzzled you—shocked you. The left side of Aubin's face had been done over by an army surgeon who, though deft and scientific, had not had a hand expert as that of the Original Sculptor. ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... Laurel's steps, but passed through a narrow wicket to the garden that lay directly behind the house. The enclosure was full of robin-song and pouring sunlight; the lilac trees on either side of the summer-house against the gallery of the stable were blurred with their new lavender flowering; the thorned glossy foliage of the hedge of June roses on Briggs Street glittered with diamonds of water; and the rockery in the far corner showed a quiver of arbutus among its strange and ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... darkness, they passed over the edge of the depression, and in an instant the huge, silent, moonlit desert was round them without a sign of the oasis which they had left. On every side the velvet, blue-black sky, with its blazing stars, sloped downwards to the vast, dun-coloured plain. The two were blurred into one ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the details of a strange dream which he had dreamed immediately before awakening on the previous night; but he sought in vain. His memory could supply only blurred images. There had been a safe in his dream, and he—was it he or another?—had unlocked it. Also there had been an enormous ivory Buddha.... Yet, stay! it had not been enormous; it ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... portfolio home with her, and later, alone in her room, read the poems it contained. Tears blurred her eyes as she read and read again the verses dated the day before. Such a lilting, joyous song ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd
... did but swoon; though my two eyes grew blurred, Dimly yet I followed you and heard your every word. And my love a spouse's strength again unto me gave;— Breast to breast, my Catiline, we ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... and Polly could not catch the words; but she had heard enough. The sheet went on crookedly. Polly did not know it, her eyes were so blurred with tears. She kept the sorry news to herself, and all day long the children wondered what ...
— Polly of the Hospital Staff • Emma C. Dowd
... the arch-hermit heard, His tranquil eyes with rage were blurred; Great fury in his bosom woke, And thus unto the youths he spoke: "Me, blameless me they dare to blame, And disallow the righteous claim My fierce austerities have earned: To ashes be the sinners turned. Caught in the noose of Fate shall they To Yama's kingdom ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... performer gave a turn in a King's Bench court the other day. There was a time when a judge would have objected to his court being turned into a theatre, but since the advent of comic judges the line of demarcation has become blurred. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... it happened that his face was right close up to this mosquito netting as it hung down at the side of the bed. He opened his eyes, but he could not see; he winked several times and shook his head; but it was no use; everything was blurred to him; the fearful thought ...
— Continuous Vaudeville • Will M. Cressy
... her the document they had prepared. She conned it slowly, what time they watched her, pausing ever and anon to brush aside the tears that blurred her vision. At last she nodded her lovely ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... The Land of Fogs—the old idea of the land of Fogs was that of a vision of confused and faint sensation, with the light of the intelligence dimmed and blurred like these gas ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... satisfy alike his heart and reason. Instead of gaining the one thing, it seemed to him that all had been lost. His present existence was as focusless as an eye after its lens has been extracted. His past had been opaque, his future would be permanently blurred. And for what good had been all the pain? It would have been far better, far more sane, if he had clung stoutly to the flaming horns of his hereditary Calvinism. Infinitely better to feel their scorching touch than to drift ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... and fully; who had carried me with him to the dizziest heights of which passion is capable; whose music I spiritually comprehended to a degree which I felt to be extraordinary—Chopin had almost no significance for me as I played then the most glorious of his compositions. His message was only a blurred sound in my ears. And gradually I perceived, as the soldier gradually perceives who has been hit by a ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... Lord was probably not usually identified with the Supreme God; for instance, in Mithraism the Sun, not Mithras, was originally the supreme God, though in the last stages of the cult the difference between the two was apparently blurred, and Mithras became indistinguishable ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... Down one of the alleys, which widened as it receded, he could see a part of the lamplit terrace where a sentry silently paced, and beyond that a corner of the town with interlacing street-lights. But all around him the young trees stood mystically blurred in the dim shine; and in the stock-still quietness the upleaping ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... however, to raise his glass indifferently to his lips. All at once his glass shook. Maria's dark and sparkling face became blurred. He could no longer define the features of the stranger. He had never before experienced anything of the kind. He tried to account for it, but ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... subject the attention inevitably wanders away. You can test this by the simplest possible case of sensorial attention. Try to attend steadfastly to a dot on the paper or on the wall. You presently find that one or the other of two things has happened: either your field of vision has become blurred, so that you now see nothing distinct at all, or else you have involuntarily ceased to look at the dot in question, and are looking at something else. But, if you ask yourself successive questions about the dot,—how ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... rolls some, don't she? Never mind, MY ballast 'll keep her on an even keel. Trunk made fast astern? All right! Say! you might furl some of this spare canvas so's I can take an observation as we go along. Don't go so fast that the scenery gets blurred, will you? It's been some time since I made this cruise, and I'd rather ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... was less conscious of his dream. This light, bright room with white panelled walls and furniture covered with gay chintzes, soft blurred chintz in palest pinks and greens, with pictures in oval frames, and people, ordinary people that he had seen before, all talking and laughing together. This was not the Redmarley that he knew, grave ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... had so desperately and as a last resource tested the efficiency of moonshine whiskey as a palliative for mental misery awaked gradually, in confusion of mind and aching of body. Noises filled his ears, and streaking lights blurred the keenness of his eyes. Reason had but little to do with his first thoughts, and feelings had nearly everything. There did not seem to be any possible atonement for him to make. Too late, as it seemed, he realized the enormity of his offence and the bitterness ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... sprung up between these two, though they were certainly very different in character. Elsie seemed to have a brooding protective care over the little unkempt Jean, exercising a sort of guardianship of her in the new life at school. She would often come to her rescue when Jean sat pouting over a blurred slate, en which she was helplessly trying to reproduce the figures on the blackboard, or give her timely aid amid the involvements of some question in the Shorter Catechism. It was Elsie who tied the bonnet-strings ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... did she know—what men? She only dimly remembered from day to day—from hour to hour. Blurred faces passed before her, blurred voices sounded in her ears, blurred personalities touched hers. It was like the jostling of a huge crowd in night streets. A vague sense of buffetings—of rude contacts—of momentary sensations of pain, of shame, of disgust, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... followed. For a time his attention was absorbed in the fragments of speech he heard. He had a doubt whether all were speaking English. Scraps floated to him, scraps like Pigeon English, like "nigger" dialect, blurred and mangled distortions. He dared accost no one with questions. The impression the people gave him jarred altogether with his preconceptions of the struggle and confirmed the old man's faith in Ostrog. It was only slowly he could bring himself to believe ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... some of the details have faded out of my memory. I recollect that I was reversed and stretched across some one's knee, and that something happened, but I cannot now remember what it was. I think there was music; but it is all dim now and blurred by the lapse of time, and this may be only ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... vast mesas of ethereal hue, Stretched in a calm and sleepy quietude, Dreamy repose and blue tranquillity; The eye which rests upon the drowsy scene Beholds a dim horizon, which presents No line of demarcation or of bounds; A merging union, blurred and indistinct; Fuliginous confusion, that the eye In viewing gazes, but no more discerns Which is the earth, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... would be the hardest to bear, the captain said quietly to the officer next to him, "Perhaps as well end it at once. Send a file of marines—" and they walked a few steps beyond my hearing, for the blood belled in my ears and blurred my eyes so that my last sight of earth was like to ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... sketch of the Palmerston time as a sketch of the present time, it would have been in many points untrue; and if I had tried to change the sketch of seven years since into a sketch of the present time, I should probably have blurred the picture and have given ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... felt himself smothering; his frame was swept with tremors. Then the raucous voices grew louder and louder, mounting into a roar, as if he were coming out from a swoon, and all the time that red blotch grew until he could see no other color; it blurred the room and the quarreling gamblers; it steeped the very air. He was still deathly sick, as only those men are whose blood sours, whose bones and muscles disintegrate at ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... some 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
... places. Carrying the weight of a boy was nothing to the horse, and before half an hour had passed, the ford and trail came in view of the anxious courier. Halting in order to survey the horizon, the haze and heat-waves of summer so obstructed his view that every object looked blurred and indistinct. Even the dust cloud was missing; and pushing on a mile farther, he reined in again. Now and then in the upper sky, an intervening cloud threw a shadow over the plain, revealing objects more ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... greatly touched at his kindness in coming. He looked considerably older than his age; his hair had grown thin and grey about his temples, and the sharp birdlike outline of his face and features seemed blurred and indeterminate. His creed too, and his whole manner of looking at things of faith, seemed to have undergone a similar process. The two had a ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... sky darkened and the stars began to appear. At length her star appeared, but its swift passage blurred before her eyes. Tires crunched on the gravel then, and headlights washed the darkness from the drive. ...
— Star Mother • Robert F. Young
... write this character. He is nature's fresh picture newly drawn in oil, which time, and much handling, dims and defaces. His soul is yet a white paper[3] unscribbled with observations of the world, wherewith, at length, it becomes a blurred note-book. He is purely happy, because he knows no evil, nor hath made means by sin to be acquainted with misery. He arrives not at the mischief of being wise, nor endures evils to come, by foreseeing them. He kisses and loves all, and, when ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... so far from making poetry of it in this passage, has vulgarised and blurred by it the natural and inevitable emotion of terror and pity. Famished wolves howking up the dead is a dreadful image—but "inhuman to relate," is not an expression heavily laden with meaning; and the sudden, abrupt, violent, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... London. He thought of the long busy chapter of his life just finished. The transition had been so abrupt. As a rule periods fade into one another gradually in life, easily, divisions blurred; it is difficult on looking back to say where the change began. One is well into the new before the old is realised as left behind. 'How did I come to this?' the mind asks itself. 'I don't remember any definite decision. Where was the boundary crossed?' ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... broke off abruptly there. They broke off because they reached a point beyond which imagination would not carry her. If he marries me! The supposition led her where all was blurred and roseate and golden, like the mists around the Happy Isles. Rosie could not forecast the conditions that would be hers as the wife of Claude Masterman. She only knew that she would be transported into an atmosphere of money, and money she had learned by sore experience to be the sovereign ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... gone about like a man in a dream. Blurred visages of men with far-away voices have saluted me at the club. Innumerable lines of print which my eyes have scanned have been destitute of meaning. I have forced myself to the mechanical task of copying piles of rough notes for my History; I have been able to bring thereto not an ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... nimbus in which he hopes to appear shining to posterity,—then he will fall into the treacherous pit of selfishness where Septimius's soul lies smothered. But this set of meanings runs imperceptibly into others, for the book is much like the cabalistic manuscript described in its pages: now it is blurred over with deceptive sameness, and again it brims with multifarious beauties like those that swim within the golden depth of Tieck's enchanted goblet. The ultimate and most insistent moral is perhaps that which brings it into comparison with Goethe's "Faust"; this, namely, that, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... singed. This has for its object the removal from the surface of the cloth of the fine fibres with which it is covered, and which would, if allowed to remain, prevent the designs printed on from coming out with sufficient clearness, giving them a blurred appearance. ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... than he thought. On reaching the top of one of those seemingly interminable land-waves, he saw a blurred object in the hollow. Soon he distinguished Cynthia's fawn-colored dust cloak, and his heart throbbed exultantly when the girl fluttered a handkerchief to show ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... on that autumn afternoon he had driven in the splendid, cushioned carriage with his young wife, how they had both wept with fright and grief, and when they had finished crying had eaten hard-boiled eggs: but what had happened after that had all become blurred—indescribably misty. ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... now all blurred and smirched with vice the day's sad pages end, For while the short 'large hours' toward the longer 'small hours' trend, With smiles that mock the wearer, and with words that half entreat, Delilah pleads for custom at the corner of the ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... The childlike grave-eyed earnestness with which Dorothea said 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 encouragement ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... brought out in skiagrams; instead of the well-defined narrow line which represents the epiphysial cartilage, there is an ill-defined, blurred zone ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... strip our lives bare of beauty, or to consign ourselves to the meagreness of the anchoretic regimen; we shall have beautiful homes and abundant pleasures; but we must learn to make our spiritual interests supreme, and not suffer our thought to be blurred and our faith enfeebled and our love stifled in ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... invitations in that handwriting. I know it well, and so does Francesca, though it is blurred; and the reason for this, according to my way of thinking, is that it has been lying next the moist stems of flowers, and, unless I do her wrong, very near to somebody's warm heart ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... knots when I boarded the mother ship of the submarines in the English East Coast port. It was an unsettled sort of morning, and just after I had walked over two narrow planks to the under-sea craft, aboard which I was to make a cruise under the North Sea, the sun shot forth a widening streak of blurred silver like a searchlight on the prancing green-grey waves. With care, the two-striper skipper gave his orders to get the submarine under way, and soon he stuck her nose at the east. One felt the frost in the air, ...
— Some Naval Yarns • Mordaunt Hall
... beautiful—then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... languages vary so widely as to make any versified translation of a poem but an imperfect reproduction of the archetype. It is like an imperfect mirror that renders but a partial likeness, in which essential features are blurred or distorted. Dante himself, the first modern critic, declared that "nothing harmonized by a musical bond can be transmuted from its own speech without losing all its sweetness and harmony," and every fresh attempt at translation affords ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... long laughed my master to himself at the discovery. What cared he for rats? He pulled his chair back to the table, and buried himself in his book for the next three hours, until his lamp began to burn low, and the letters on the pages grew blurred and dim, and the rats had scuffled back by the way they came, and my flagging hands ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... clear issue was to be blurred in the blinding glare of the King's lunacy. The causes of the malady of February 1801 were partly physical, partly mental. While still agitated by the dismissal of his trusted Minister, the King, two days later, went to church on the day appointed for the National Fast. That day ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... answer to the call of the sea, with no golden bait to draw them on. The old spirit still lives, disguise it as you will with top hats, frock coats, and all prosaic settings. Perhaps even they also will seem romantic when centuries have blurred them. ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... last he understood the girl, and as he thought of her shrinking aloofness standing guard over her eager longing for friends—for affection, something hot and wet blurred his eyes. He was scarcely conscious that the man, who had taken to himself the name with which he had become hatefully familiar during his years in Brookville, was still speaking, till a startling sentence or two ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... superstition of the monks has given rise. The figures of fiends in aspects of 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
... against her face. There were few other passengers in the train, which was too hot. The winter twilight shut down early, and at last the storm broke; not violently, but with a stern and steady persistence. The windows ran rain, and were blurred with steam, the darkening landscape swept by under a deluge. When the train stopped at a station, a rush of wet air, mingled with the odors of mackintoshes and the wet leather of motor cars, came in. Rachael would look out to see meetings, lanterns and ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... It was a waltz tune. The pale girls, the old widow lady, the three Jews lodging in the same boarding-house, the dandy, the major, the horse- dealer, and the gentleman of independent means, all wore the same blurred, drugged expression, and through the chinks in the planks at their feet they could see the green summer waves, peacefully, amiably, swaying round the iron pillars of ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... came the solemn tones of an organ and the full voices of a choir. The softened harmonies seemed to float into their torn hearts, and they wept. The gray dawn was creeping in. It blurred the red light ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... a man must possess at least three virtues—honesty, courage and generosity. In cultivated society, cultivation is often more important than soil. A well executed counterfeit passes more readily than a blurred genuine. It is necessary only to observe the unwritten laws of society—to be honest enough to keep out of prison, and generous enough to subscribe in public—where the subscription can be defended as an investment. In a new country, character ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... eyes—like the eyes of a lion in color—at the street. Not for the world would she let him see that she wanted to cry! A figure, blurred to indistinctness, appealed in a doorway nearly opposite, stood for a moment looking up at the reddened sky, and came across the street. As the tears were beaten back she saw and recognized him, with a curl ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... Everything was blurred before my eyes, for it was only then that the full realisation came upon me that the man at the rudder—the man who held all our lives in his ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... was scarcely a hundred yards away. The heat waves shimmered above the reddish desert sand until the Martians were blurred before Charlie's burning eyes. His feet churned the clinging mud, and he felt as if he were running in ...
— Flamedown • Horace Brown Fyfe
... return trail made by the feet of those who had come back from the chasm's edge. Our eyes fell upon these tracks at the same moment, and we each gave a cry of horror, and stood gazing speechlessly at them. For there, in those blurred footmarks, ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... and that, in his present mood, was more to his purpose than the exact shade of her taste. It was odd, too, to discover suddenly that the blurred tapestry of Mrs. Murrett's background had all the while been alive and full of eyes. Now, with a pair of them looking into his, he was conscious of a ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... nothing to Jack or Henry, who had not yet caught sight of the object; but I could not withdraw my eyes from it. Sometimes I persuaded myself that it was growing larger, and then, with the intensity of my gaze, it blurred and seemed to fade. At last Jack spied it, and instantly, in ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... lives of his followers. The picture of the derelict crew in their little boat was ever in his mind as he had last seen them watching with despairing eyes their ship sail away; and again as distance blurred all form, and it lay a blot on the sunny waters, immediately before it was hidden by ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... from forward by the speed of the ship, passed steadily through the long gloom between the high bulwarks, swept over the rows of prone bodies; a few dim flames in globe-lamps were hung short here and there under the ridge-poles, and in the blurred circles of light thrown down and trembling slightly to the unceasing vibration of the ship appeared a chin upturned, two closed eyelids, a dark hand with silver rings, a meagre limb draped in a torn covering, a head bent back, a naked foot, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... from a variety of causes. If an impression is clear, but the gold not solid, it is probably because the tool was not hot enough, or was not put down firmly. If only one side of an impression fails to stick, it is usually because the tool was unevenly impressed. If an impression is blurred, and the gold has a frosted look, it is because the leather has been burned, either because the tool was too hot, or kept down too long, or the preparation was ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... lamp. From the mysterious greyness, the olive groves and lanes beneath my terrace, rises a confused quaver of frogs, and buzz and whirr of insects: something, in sound, like the vague trails of countless stars, the galaxies on galaxies blurred into mere blue shimmer by the moon, which rides slowly across the highest heaven. The olive twigs glisten in the rays: the flowers of the pomegranate and oleander are only veiled as with bluish mist in their scarlet and rose. In the sea is another sea, of molten, rippled silver, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... for there was unmistakable ladyhood in her delicately tailored trimness—she bickered at us in a cheerful way, on top of those bushes which were so loaded with the night's rainfall that they shone a blurred cobweb gray in the lifting light. Her eye was also dark and polished and lucid, like a bead of ink. It also had the same effect of tribulation on our spirit. Neither the catbird nor the frog, we said to ourself, would have tormented their souls trying to "invent" something to write ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... gave way to light. The different portions of the craft, instead of all being blurred into one, took upon themselves shape, and stood out wet and distinct in the cold grey of the breaking day. But the lighter it became, the harder the skipper stared and rubbed his eyes, and looked from the ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... beautiful. Up to the hour that she let go she had lived as they live who are drugged. She had looked on life with her senses blurred and her actions largely controlled ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... yourself away by some unconsidered word that he would snap up with delight. It was that peculiarity that somehow put me on my guard. I had no idea who I was facing across the table and as a matter of fact I did not care. All my impressions were blurred; and even the promptings of my instinct were the haziest thing imaginable. Now and then I had acute hallucinations of a woman with an arrow of gold in her hair. This caused alternate moments of exaltation and depression from which ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... optimist, and misfortune never quite got him down and kept him there, though it tried hard and often, as you will presently see. Some called him gritty. Some said he hadn't the sense to know when he was licked. Either way, it made a rare little Irishman of Casey Ryan, and kept his name from becoming blurred in the memories of those who once ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... anteroom; the curtains between them and the main apartment had made the light dim, for just beyond he could make out the blurred ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... mark 'midst the wave-blurred mass, In lines distinct, in colors clear defined, The typic groups and figures of mankind. Behold within the cool and liquid glass Bright child-folk sporting with smooth yellow shells, Astride of dolphins, leaping up to kiss Fair mother-faces. From the vast abyss How joyously their thought-free ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man. We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with respect ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... those American songs to which half a century ago, in another war for Freedom, men marched to battle, and, even if by ways of defeat and death, to ultimate Victory. How many there were that April day for whom the sight of the Stars and Stripes was blurred with tears. How the familiar airs and simple words pained us with the memory of our distant homes. Perhaps for the first time we understood the solemn significance of this dedication to war of what we hardly knew was so ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... The memories that mercifully blurred became clear again. He knew that in due course the mishandled embryo experienced birth, entering the world normally as a helpless, feebly squirming, pathetically vulnerable mite, and in no way drew unusual attention to itself. No one knew, or cared, that intellectual awakening was phenomenally ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... 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, and are still recorded with painful elaboration; while the sidelights ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... soft thud of little hoofs on the prairie, for Felix was beating it back toward Willer Bend, with a speed that astonished his late rider. Whitey started after him instinctively, but he soon realized that that was useless, and he stood and watched, while Felix became a blurred spot in the distance. Whitey didn't know that it was time to quit for the day at the grinding-mill—and it would not have done him ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... find her slate, and when she did find it many of the figures were blurred, for Barbara had sat upon it. And then the numbers seemed to dance before her, and each time that she added, the answer was different. She went over and over the sums until her head ached. The table was covered with little square bits of paper on which she had written ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... The slave he dragged the Tyrant drove. Her awe of him his dread of her invoked: His nature with her shivering faith ran yoked. What wisdom counselled, Policy declined; All perils dared he save the step behind. Ahead his grand initiative becked: One spark of radiance blurred, his orb was wrecked. Stripped to the despot upstart, for success He raged to clothe a perilous nakedness. He would not fall, while falling; would not be taught, While learning; would not relax his grasp on aught He held in hand, while losing it; pressed advance, Pricked for her lees the veins of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... light faded away Ned ran back to the buttonwood tree, and watched the blurred shape of the boat as it came down the channel. He breathed a sigh of relief when it passed out from the islands and continued on through the gloom, for his first thought had been that ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... along the wet pavement, and the figure of a man, dimly seen by the blurred light of the street-lamps, came hurrying along the other side of the way. Something in the firm free step, in the upright carriage, in the height and build of the passer-by, arrested my attention. He drew nearer. He passed ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... until the type grew blurred. What did it mean? He asked himself that a thousand times. What did it mean? He sought his room and locked the door, striding up and down with agitation, the cablegram clenched in his hand. He was beside himself, ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... A rush of sensations affected him so that he shook like one whose strength is gone. His vision was blurred. Fort and town swimming in a mist were silent and still. Save the British flag twinkling above Hamilton's headquarters, nothing indicated that the place was not deserted. And Alice? With the sweet name's echo Beverley's heart bounded high, then sank ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... only, the name is written in full; but the first part is blurred. It may be Alius (Ali), Julius (Jules), Elias, or may represent any one of a dozen English surnames. The single cipher, employed elsewhere throws no light ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... eyebrows hiding his eyes, with trembling hands that tore the envelope, Philip took out the letter and read it in passages—broken, blurred, smudged, as by the smoke of a ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... and almost deserted. Only the IMT transit lock beneath one of the sprawling ranch houses showed in the vague light spreading out of the big scanning plate in an upper wall section. The plate framed an unimpressive section of the galaxy, a blurred scattering of stars condensing toward the right, and, somewhat left of center, a ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... moist film on the window through which the street lamps showed blurred and indistinct, and he rubbed the pane clear with the tips of his fingers (he described every action to ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... an Englishman, with some fading signs about him of decent birth, decent education and upbringing, but such signs were blurred and almost obliterated by the habits which had degraded him. He would have been dead or in prison or the poorhouse years ago if Carmen had not chosen to rescue him, more through a whim than from genuine charity. Her mother's people had been English, and somehow she had not ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... disconsolate figure in the general blankness, with his high boots and oilskins, smoking a short clay pipe by the door of the engine-room; and further out, under the dripping dome of an umbrella, sat Oswyn in a great pea-jacket, smoking, painting the mist, the rain, the white river with its few blurred barges and its background of dreary warehouses, in a supreme disregard of the ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... before." The photograph was a little faded—Martin's eyes had lost some of their appealing darkness and the curves of the mouth she had loved were dim.... She put her face close to the faded face in the photograph, and looked at it. Gradually it blurred in a mist of tears, and she could feel her heart beating very slowly, as if ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... apparatus, which we will now consider, the negative is placed in the holder opposite the center of the ground-glass, upside down and facing into the work room. The room is darkened and lens uncapped. An image more or less blurred will appear on the screen. If the enlarged picture is to be only slightly larger than the negative, the lens must be racked out until its distance from the negative is but little less than its distance from the screen. To make the enlargement greater we simply ...
— Bromide Printing and Enlarging • John A. Tennant |
