"Blurred" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at hand was a pile of dry wood cut into short lengths. In an instant the awful meaning of these preparations flashed across his mind. They intended to boil him alive! For a moment he felt sick and dizzy. All things spun in a mad whirl before his blurred vision, and he feared his senses were departing. Recovering himself by a supreme effort of will, and animated by an access of fury, he sprang forward, overturned the tub, so that its contents were poured on the hissing flames, instantly ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... his steps, the music grew louder and louder in his ears, he gained the ornamental posts crowned by their incandescent globes, made his way through the loiterers, descended the stone steps of the restaurant, and stood staring into it as at a blurred picture. The band crashed a popular two-step above the mingled voices and laughter. He sat down at a vacant table near the door, and presently became aware that a waiter had been for ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... she went to open her window, she noticed that the houses opposite had lost courage and showed only cracks. She stood a second looking up at the stars, twinkling with tiny blue rays through the clear air. By turning her head to the west she could look down on the park, with its surface of bare, blurred tree-branches pierced by rows of lights. The familiar sight suddenly seemed to her almost intolerably beautiful. "Oh, I love him so much!" she said to herself, and her lips actually whispered the words, "so ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. We have 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 preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity. We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... black lines banding the front edge when the book is bound. The bottom line is taken by the binder as his guide in arranging the sheets, this line always appearing true on the front edge and the others blurred. The top margin has more than twice the breadth of the lower. After the sheets are gathered, holes are punched at proper distances from the back edge—four seems to be the regulation number whether the book be large or small, ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... before the veil took on another shade of red and blurred completely his vision of the outside. But the final thickening did not keep him from seeing that Doctor Eumenes was staring down at him as if he were peering into a dusky burrow. And Jack could make out the eyes. They were large, ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... be a greater misfortune than to want education, except it be the having a bad one. The minds of young persons are generally compared to paper on which we may write whatever we think fit, but if it be once blurred and blotted with improper characters, it becomes much harder to impress proper sentiments thereon, because those which were first there must be totally erased. This seems to have been too much the case with the unhappy person of ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... unfamiliar detachment, Miss Evelina settled herself to think. The first hurt and the long pain which followed it, the blurred agony of remembrance when she had come back to the empty house, then the sharp, clean-cut stroke when she stood on the road, her eyes downcast, and heard the wheels rush by, then clear and challenging, the ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... love, and I saw on the leaf that sign with which once or twice in my life I have had a letter sealed,—a round spot where the paper is slightly corrugated, and, if there is writing there, the letters are somewhat faint and blurred. Most of the pages were surrounded with emblematic traceries. It was strange to me at first to see how often she introduced those homelier wild-flowers which we call weeds,—for it seemed there was none of them ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... moment or two dwellings swept by like so many telegraph-poles past a car-window. Then they became more widely spaced, and were succeeded by a blurred and incoherent expanse of woods, fields, parks, hedges, glimpses of lawns surfaced like a billiard-table, flashes of white facades maculated with cool ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... expecting. Annabel had spoken calmly enough and steadily, but his brain refused at first to accept the full meaning of her words. It seemed to him that a sort of mist had risen up between them. Everything was blurred. Only her face was clear, frail and delicate, almost flower-like, with the sad haunting eyes ever watching his. Annabel a murderess! ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to some distance from the eyes, in order that the image thereof may come within the eye more easily and more subtly, and thereby the lettering is left impressed on the sight more distinctly and connectedly. For like reason the star also may appear blurred; and I had experience of this in the same year in which this Song was born, for, by trying the eyes very much in the labour of reading, the visual spirits were so weakened that the stars all appeared to me to be blurred by some ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... was whirled this way and that, the men from whom he had struck himself free recovered themselves, closed in upon him. A blow between the eyes half stunned him, another on his mouth silenced his laughter. The room was getting blurred. He was forced back against the bar, fighting, but not effectively. The snarling laughter was not his now, ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... 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 ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... time when she delivered a shrill-voiced, tear-blurred ultimatum to Brit. Either he must sell out and move to town, or she would take the children and leave him. Of towns Brit knew nothing except the post-office, saloon, cheap restaurant side,—and a barber shop where ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... Lapelle. It was then that Kenneth noticed that his eyes were slightly blurred and his voice a trifle thick. He ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... let into it. If he is afraid of the universe if he only lets his thoughts and passions live in a very little of it, he is apt to assume that if a beautiful thing rises into the sublime and immeasurable—suggests boundless ideas—the beauty is blurred out of it. It is something—there is no denying that it is something—but, whatever it is or is not, it is not beauty. Nearly everything in our modern life is getting too big to be beautiful. Our poets are dumb because they see more poetry than their theories have room for. The fundamental ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... his feet, but beyond that there was only a brown darkness, scented with the smell of books in leather bindings, in which the figures of several men, sprawled out in big chairs before the window, were faintly visible. The window itself, a square of blank fog-blurred dusk, served merely to heighten the obscurity. Mr. Vandusen, a small, plump shadow in the surrounding shadows, found an unoccupied chair and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the letter again and again, until the words seemed blurred and the lines irregular as a spider's web. Then she thought: "We can not part forever like this. I must see him again whatever happens. Perhaps he has not ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... manner, thinking that if she should make a slip it would be so buried in the surrounding confusion that no one could be certain whether she had actually made it or not; with the result that her talk was a sort of continuous, blurred expectoration, out of which would emerge, at rare intervals, those sounds and syllables of which she felt positive. Swann supposed himself entitled to poke a little mild fun at her in conversation with M. Verdurin, who, however, was ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... ladder was possible, but not with out some risk. The boy paused at nothing, reached the iron rungs with a bound, and started down the perpendicular ladder. Down, down he went for many minutes, his candle feebly illuminating a blurred patch about his head. Above, through a bewildering space of darkness, the grated opening at the surface shone like a faint star in another sphere; below was solid blackness; about him the slime of the dripping ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... doing so he unconsciously enters upon an unequal contest with Lady Cicely, who sits quietly stitching. It soon becomes clear that a tranquil woman can go on sewing longer than an angry man can go on fuming. Further, it begins to dawn on Brassbound's wrath-blurred perception that Lady Cicely has at some unnoticed stage in the proceedings finished Marzo's bandage, and is now stitching a coat. He stops; glances at his shirtsleeves; ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... particularly well acquainted with London, but he had a rough idea of direction. The fog was thick, but he could see the blurred nimbus of a street lamp, and was midway between two of these when he heard ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... down, over his boy, and kissed him. If his sight were dimmed as he did so, by something that for a moment blurred the little face, and made it indistinct to him, his mental vision may have been, for that short time, the ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... striations, watery and colorless, in the lower slopes of the morning sky, and these were taking on the light of dawn without its hues. Long wind-blown streaks crossed the zenith from east to west and the setting stars were blurred. The moon had worn a narrowing circlet in the night. Meneptah shook ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... music book in his hand. He placed it on the piano-desk and mumbled: "Very indifferent. Read this at sight." Puzzled by the miserable light, the still more wretched typography, I peered at the notes as peers a miser at the gold he is soon to lose. No avail. My vision was blurred, my fingers leaden. Suddenly I noticed that, whether through malicious intent or stupid carelessness, the book was upside down. Now, I knew my Bach fugues, if I may say it, backward. Something familiar about the musical text told me that before me, inverted, was the ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... that year anonymously, and began to sell. I lived on at Eton with an old friend; went daily up to Windsor Castle, and toiled through volumes of papers. But I found that it was not possible to work more than a few hours a day at the task of selection, because one's judgment got fatigued and blurred. ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... different 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 a new proof of the truth of his assertion. Each language ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... about the third silent revolution there came the startling roar of the exhaust that told the boys that all the cylinders were getting down to work. Blue flames and smoke belched out of the vents and the mechanics sprang back, as the propellers whirled round at a pace that made them seem blurred shadows. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... she made for herself a crown, reflecting from herself the eternal rays. From that region which thunders highest up no mortal eye is so far distant, in whatsoever sea it loses itself the lowest,[1] as there from Beatrice was my sight. But this was naught to me, for her image did not descend to me blurred by ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... was bounding away in pursuit of his last companion with a winged gallop. It seemed that the wind caught him up and buoyed him from stride to stride, and the cowpunchers with hungry, burning eyes watched without a word until the grey and the chestnut blurred on the horizon and dipped out of view together. The spell was broken in the same instant by a stream of profanity floating up from the rear. It was Lew Hervey ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... Lafayette flew by our eyes a mere line of stores and houses; we hardly slackened our speed going through, and then we began the long run northward to Chicago. We saw people turn to look at us as we rushed along, and then their faces blurred and vanished from sight. Now and then a chicken flew up right under the very wheels and once we ran over one. But we went on, on, unheeding. Then we struck a stretch of soft road and thought for a minute we ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... experience the very opposite of that error of which I have just been speaking. There are some of us, perhaps, who have so profound a sense of their own shortcomings and sins that the mists rising from these have blurred the sky to us and shut out the sun. Some of you, perhaps, may be saying to yourselves that you cannot get hold of God's love because your sin seems to you to be so great, or may be saying to yourselves ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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
... bend of the river driven by paddles in hands that were wonderfully skilled. They were about to pass out of view behind the grey wall of stone which lined the waterway. The figure of the girl in the prow of the hindmost boat was blurred and indistinct. Marcel had eyes for nothing else. He raised his fur cap and waved it slowly to and fro. And as he waved he thought he detected a similar movement in the boat. He could not be sure at the ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... And as we came back home, pa said to Mr. Miller: "Henry Bannerman is a kind of Rip Van Winkle—a extra wheel—he's been asleep ten years, anyway." So Mitch and me began to beg for the story about Henry Bannerman, which was that he drank until he had a fever and when he came out of the fever, he was blurred like and not keen like when he could recite Shakespeare and practice law fine. So pa said that once when Henry first began to practice law again after comin' out of the fever, he had a little office in the court house ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... embarrass my relatives. Between ourselves, I don't expect to make a fortune out of photography. The first days especially were very difficult. Nobody came, or if by chance some unfortunate wight did mount, I made a failure of him, got on my plate only an image blurred and vague as a phantom. One day, at the very beginning, a wedding-party came up to me, the bride all in white, the bridegroom with a waistcoat—like that! And all the guests in white gloves, which they insisted on keeping on for the portrait on account of the rarity of such an ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... if they showed hopeless to the instructed eye. Otherwise, one must do one's own developing, and trust the result, whatever it is, to the imaginative kindness of the reader, who will surely, if he is the right sort of reader, be able to sharpen the blurred details, to soften the harsh lights, and blend the shadows in a subordination giving due relief to the best meaning of the print. This is what I fancy myself to be doing now, and if any one shall say that my little ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... and desolate. From a farmhouse in the bosom of the tree-hung hills lights were already twinkling, and when he reached the edge of the moor, and the sea spread itself out almost at his feet, the shapes of the passing steamers, with their long trail of smoke, were blurred and uncertain. Below, his home field, his wall-enclosed patch of kitchen garden, the long, low house itself lay like pieces from a child's play-box stretched out upon the carpet. Only to-night there was ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... heads was no arrangement for lighting. We bent lower in semi-obscurity. In the blending of twilight and gaslight the room became mysterious, a shadowy corridor. Figures grew indistinct, softened and blurred. The exhausted air surrounded the gas jets in ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... dabbling in amateur photography, and every amateur must take "action" pictures with his first camera. It is a natural desire to attain to the hardest before understanding how to reach it. The result is one of two things: either a blurred moving object and a clear background, or a clear moving object and a blurred background. Both suggest speed, but only one is a good picture of the object one attempted to photograph. In the first case the camera ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... himself whirled round and round—spinning like a top. The water, the banks, the forests, the now distant bridge, fort and men —all were commingled and blurred. Objects were represented by their colors only; circular horizontal streaks of color—that was all he saw. He had been caught in a vortex and was being whirled on with a velocity of advance and gyration that made him giddy and sick. In a few moments he was flung upon the gravel ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... with the edges a little wavering, a little blurred, as if it had been burnt by fire into the whiteness of the page. Below, the smaller type of a chorus reeled and shook through all its lines. Set up ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... went by, regained the peace and patience which give a sober cheerfulness to life. The pangs of her heart grew dull and transient; but there were two pictures in her memory which never blurred in outline or faded in color: one, the brake of autumn flowers, under the bright autumnal sky, with bird and stream making accordant music to the new voice of love; the other, a rainy street, with a lost, reckless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... he would not wait long. After she had returned to her home he would go to it and tell her why he had come. All through the day certain words had sung in his ears, and over his books had danced and blurred the figures he was making; and before him in fancy she was waiting for his coming when the day was done, was in the room with outstretched hands to give him greeting as he entered the door. The light of a new vision ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... the piazza, but I could see Father's face in the light from the window; and it looked—well, I'd never seen it look like that before. It was as if something that had been on it for years had dropped off and left it clear where before it had been blurred and indistinct. No, that doesn't exactly describe it either. I can't describe it. But I'll go on and say ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... night. Then suddenly he ground on his brakes, the machine twisted and snarled like an angry beast and came to a stand almost into the arms of a barricade across the road. The young man hurled out an oath, and leaned forward to look, his eyes almost too blood-shot and blurred to read: ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... it was necessary to seek her out, for already her image was nebulous, and he could not piece together a satisfactory picture of her. She obsessed his thoughts, but his intense desire to fix her indelibly therein had defeated its purpose and had blurred the photograph. Who was she? What was she? Where was she going? What did she think of him? The possibility that she might leave Dyea before answering those questions spurred him into a ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... A blurred noise of moaning came down the passage-way from the black heart of the Talayot. "That other poor devil's coming to his senses again, and is feeling lonely," thought I, and retraced my steps. The little man was talking a bit incoherently, whimpering ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... and blue shadows before, they looked like one of Hedger's own paintings of that period; two figures, one white and one dark, and nothing whatever distinguishable about them but that they were male and female. The faces were lost, the contours blurred in shadow, but the figures were a man and a woman, and that was their whole concern and their mysterious beauty,—it was the rhythm in which they moved, at last, along the roof and down into the dark ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... of the past, any attempt to recall the features of a beloved being shows them to one's vision as through a mist of tears—dim and blurred. Those tears are the tears of the imagination. When I try to recall Mamma as she was then, I see, true, her brown eyes, expressive always of love and kindness, the small mole on her neck below where the small hairs grow, her white embroidered collar, and the ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... knew my ultimate destination was sufficient. The way that led to it, which I had never seen before, should never see again perhaps, and through which I travelled at the rate of an express, seemed a fairy non-existent Hollow Land. Landscapes grew blurred with the speed of our passage. They loomed up on us like waves, stayed with us for a second and vanished. The staff-officer, who was my conductor, drowsed on his seat beside the driver. He had wearied ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... he went through the gateway, and chose a path at random. To the idlers on the garden benches who took note of him as he passed, he gave the impression of one struggling with nausea. To his own blurred consciousness, he could not say which stirred most vehemently within him, his loathing for the creature he had fed and ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... though smitten, his face a dull red. The dancing heat mist blurred before his eyes. He said nothing. They turned presently and strolled down toward the foot of the arroyo. Barkley pushed his hat back ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... of the disadvantages of reading books about natural scenery that they fill the mind with pictures, often exaggerated, often distorted, often blurred, and, even when well drawn, injurious to the freshness of first impressions. Such has been the fate of most of us with regard to the Falls of Niagara. There was little accuracy in the estimates of the first observers of ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Father Adrian paused. "Listen," he said, in a low, deep tone. "There are secret pages in the lives of most of us—pages blurred and scarred with misery and suffering and sin. But there is a difference—a great difference. Some are turned over with firm and penitent fingers, and, although their scarlet record may never be blotted out, yet, by sacrifice and atonement, the fruits ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Parliamentary Artistic Hand been at it again; looking with eyesight blurred with sorrow on familiar forms of some Members stranded at General Election. Dismembered, and, for some time at least, not to be remembered. COWLEY LAMBERT always been a rover. Went Midland Circuit for short time, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 3, 1892 • Various
... while shapes of fantastic beasts climb up the angles, animated by that great thought of Art, which in those old days gave life to inanimate nature. These relics, resisting change, present to the eye of painters those dusky tones and half-blurred features in which ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... below the wooded hills and left us in a soft gloom. Several camp fires begin to twinkle along the road where the caravans we overtook, and others from the east, are preparing for the night. Our Chinese coolies too have their fires going near us, the smoke helping to soften the already blurred evening effect. We have had, for us, a long afternoon's ride—a little tiring and hot in the bottom of the valley when the path came down to the Taiping river,—a winding and twisting path, round ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... to return to Chamberi for the winter, and the day of their departure from Les Charmettes was always a day blurred and tearful for Rousseau; he never left it without kissing the ground, the trees, the flowers; he had to be torn away from it as from a loved companion. At the first melting of the winter snows they left their dungeon in Chamberi, and they never missed the earliest song of the nightingale. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... be absolutely precise. The two-and three-part contrapuntal singing which is done in the sight-singing classes is admirable for this, as the whole effect is blurred or entirely spoilt in such clear-cut ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... he finished the resetting quickly and tried again. This time the name read correctly but it slanted down the card and was blurred and inky. Bobby fussed for a long time to get the line straight. Experiment seemed only to approximate. One end persisted in rising too high or sinking too low. The problem was absorbing and all the ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... 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 ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... sloping lawn, side by side, Sir Rowland leaning on his cane, bareheaded, his feathered hat tucked under his arm. Before them the river's smooth expanse, swollen and yellow with the recent rains, glowed like a sheet of copper, so that it blurred the sight to look ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... out of the room. A shadow blurred the sunlight in Nancy's face —there was uneasiness in it, and disappointment. A procession of disturbing thoughts began to troop through her mind. Saying nothing aloud, she sat with her hands in her lap; now and then she clasped them, ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... '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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... inquiry is indeed intuitively manifest Brought face to face with these blurred copies of himself, the least thoughtful of men is conscious of a certain shock, due perhaps, not so much to disgust at the aspect of what looks like an insulting caricature, as to the awakening of a sudden ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... seen a man die?" She had surmised from his manner that night that he would not hesitate to kill the parson, and now she knew that her sacrifice had not been made in vain. A sob shook her, the world reeled, blurred, and she covered her ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... of the house with the help of the light from a solitary candle hanging in a sconce upon the wall, it had once been a handsome building. Now, however, it had fallen sadly to decay. The ceiling of the hall had at one time been richly painted, but now only blurred traces of the design remained. Crossing the hall, my guide opened a door at the further end. In obedience to a request from Hayle, I entered this room, to find myself standing in a fine apartment, so far as size went, but sadly lacking in comfort ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... when they arrived at this place. The sun was becoming blurred and a storm appeared brewing. Fresno dismounted, dropping the halter of the mustang. Then he let go his own bridle. The eyes he bent on Allie made her turn hers away as from something that could scorch and stain. He pulled her off ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... in the valley. There was a blurred clamor of voices. He looked at the sky, at the black summits of the hills. He stood up, and his inseparable sword ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... last words blurred in Clyde's ringing ears. The friendly darkness hid her flaming cheeks. Why, oh why, had she listened? She was not even shocked by Casey's muttered curse. She felt his hand on her arm, drawing her gently back into the deeper shadows. In ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... from church or parish-school, and without any, nearer than several miles, to minister to the spiritual wants of the people, it was a rather rough and ignorant place, with a good many superstitions— none of them in their nature specially mischievous, except indeed as they blurred the idea of divine care and government—just the country for bogill-baes and brownie-baes, boodies and water-kelpies to linger and disport themselves, long after they had ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... upon some paper to remove the superfluous powder, and then upon the actual work. Carefully remove the tracing-paper; there should now be visible upon the surface of the material, in charcoal dust, a perfectly clear reproduction of the pattern. Should, however, the impression be blurred, it is quite easy to flick everything away with a duster and repeat the process. The causes of failure would most probably be that the perforations were too large or too far apart, or that there was some movement of either paper or material during the ...
— Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving • Grace Christie
... and dreamed and dreamed of walking the streets at night, through the driving snow of winter and down to the wharves and the river, with its cakes of ice and its welcome. And when the first day I had gone to sit in the intelligence room and a lady—she seemed like a blurred picture to me and her questions were far away like the rumble of a train at night—had hired me, I took my alligator bag that was left out of the wreck of old elegance, and I stood up and tried to follow her like a dog till ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... began to turn about me. The words grew blurred before my eyes I raised my hands in distraction to my head and fell sobbing ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... trail that took her toward the Del Oro. After hours of travel she came to the saddle from which one looked down to the gap in the canyon walls that had been the common watering place of all men's cattle, but now was homesteaded by her father. Far below her it lay, a dwarfed picture with detail blurred to a vague impressionistic map. She could see the hut, the fence line running parallel to the stream on the other side, some grazing cattle, ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... radiant helmet of heaven is white with its stars. From the house they have left, glowing yellow in all its windows, unreal against the night as if it were only a huge flat toy made out of paper with a candle burning behind it, comes music, blurred but insistent, faint as if heard over water, dull and throbbing like horse-hoofs muffled with leather treading ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... was mistaken after all," he thought to himself. "There was so much sand blowing at the time that I might very well have had a blurred vision." ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... which is essentially the weapon of a cultured man, are crude. First, my attainments, my classical and literary knowledge, blurred, perhaps, by immoderate drinking—which reminds me that before my soul went to the Gods last night, I sold the Pickering Horace you so kindly lent me. Ditta Mull the Clothesman has it. It fetched ten annas, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... look," said Hugh, resolutely turning to the pages. Lady Tennys leaned weakly against the counter and looked through blurred eyes at the racing lines of ink. Hugh rapidly ran his fingers through the list, passing dozens of passengers they had known. As the finger approached the "R's" it moved more slowly, more tremblingly. "Reed—Reyer—Ridge!" "Hugh Ridge, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A." He grew sick when he saw his ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... veil, and put it on again. The sight of her face, momentary as it had been, reassured Emily. Her wild eyes, made wilder still by the blurred stains of rouge below them, half washed away—her disheveled hair, with streaks of gray showing through the dye—presented a spectacle which would have been grotesque under other circumstances, but which now reminded Emily of Mr. ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... to find something to make her forget the mortal weariness that was almost as hard to bear as pain, as she turned the leaves of her old favorite, Pilgrims's Progress, she found a little paper, scribbled over in Jo's hand. The name caught her eye and the blurred look of the lines made her sure that tears had fallen ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... knew that John Appleton had offered her marriage, and he had never hidden the fact. What they did not know was that she had told him what she meant to do before she did it. He had spoken to her plainly, bluntly, then with a voice that was blurred and a little broken, urging her against the course toward which she was set; but it had not availed; and, realizing that he had come upon a powerful will underneath the sunny and so human surface, he had ceased to ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... out through the heat shimmer, gradually rising as the plain slanted. Imperceptibly the camp and the trees marking the river's course fell below us and into the heat haze. In the distance, close to the stream, we made out a blurred, brown-red solid mass which we knew for Masai cattle. Various little Thompson's gazelles skipped away to the left waggling their tails vigorously and continuously as Nature long since commanded "Tommies" to do. The heat haze steadied around ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... early morning. It was raining,—a fine quiet, determined rain, that blurred the lower reaches of the valley, and entirely hid the mountain-tops, so that one found it hard not to doubt a little whether they were still there. Near at hand the garden was as if a thin web of silver had been cast over it, pale and dim, where wet surfaces ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... The clock struck three. A dismal, dingy light came in through the windows. Dark clouds were sailing over the sky, which made it still gloomier. Through the panes of glass, which were covered with moisture, Paris could only be dimly seen; the watery vapor blurred it; its far-away outskirts seemed hidden by thick smoke. Thus the city even was no longer there to keep the child company, as on bright afternoons, when, on leaning out a little, it seemed to her as though she could touch each district ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... several minutes, and then, traversing the wood, found their horses and mounted. The grass stretched away, blurred and shadowy, and though they could see nothing that moved upon it, a beat of hoofs came softly ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... one of those great men of genius to whom the gods have permitted an un-blurred vision of the eternal normalities of human weakness. This vision he can never forget. He takes his stand upon the ground which it covers, and from that ground he ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... spoke, toward the ridge of the Knockawn, though with no particular expectation of seeing what they wished upon it. But behold, just at that moment three figures, blurred among the gray ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... down the bay and into the sound that night was a wonderful adventure. She remembered it afterward far more vividly than the shipwreck, which became blurred in retrospect, so that she soon began to think of it as of some half-forgotten nightmare. To begin with, the personality of Murray O'Neil intrigued her more and more. The man was so strong, so sympathetic, ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... are well pleased with the progress made, the left wing being pushed well forward. The weather during the day was bright, but windy, and with horses and wagons at the gallop the dust was very troublesome, the whole scene being often blurred. Towards evening the cold was intense. What wind we have had here has always been from the north, and at night it might ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... to seaward, and the coast was but a blurred line. Two vague shadows in the offing showed where the galeasses rolled and tossed upon the great Atlantic rollers, Hawtayne looked wistfully in ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that Buddy missed Frank Davis, who had mysteriously gone to Heaven, according to mother. Buddy's interest in Heaven was extremely keen for a time, and he asked questions which not even mother could answer. Then his memory of Frank Davis blurred. But never his memory of that terrible time when the Tomahawk outfit lost five hundred cattle in the dry drive and the ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... and started back down stream. He must gain shelter soon, or he would be unable to find his way. He was not any too hasty in his decision. In a few minutes the outlines of the stream and its banks were blended into a blurred white mass. Then he could no longer see the shore at any distance, and even the path was ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... this, though it was straight before her eyes. She only saw a blurred mist; she heard no sound of waters, though it filled the ears of those around. Instead she heard low whispers pronouncing Philip's ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... paper. Then, as the words swam and blurred together in one long, discouraging line, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... the man, at a loss to catch the drift of these appeals, by reason of their all being spoken in a succession so rapid as to make a single blurred sentence. "Hold on! What's wrong? And where did the pup come from? He's a looker, all right a cute little cuss. What's ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... him to say something, and there was nothing for him to do but to make the effort. For an hour, as he sat during the last lessons,—which were in the nature of a review,—the pages before him had been mere blurred spaces of white, and he had been cogitating what he should say. Yet, when he rose, every idea that he had tried so faithfully to put into shape fled from ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... its flat-roofed adobes lay ahead of him now, its lights twinkling like fallen stars. Away off to the right he could see the blurred lights of San Diego and the phosphorescent gleam of the bay and ocean beyond. Beautiful beyond words was the broad view he got, but its beauty could only vaguely impress him then, though he might later ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... For the first few moments she did not seem so beautiful as he had pictured her. So long had he laboured and lain awake over the first image he had carried away of her that the impression had become blurred, and the type that had originally imprinted it on his heart no longer corresponded with the result created by his mind's unconscious working. Then he was disconcerted to see neither the white stola and saffron mantle nor the bracelets and fillets that had seemed to him part and ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... made a casual survey of us all, taking it for granted that I was one of the local inhabitants. For this respite from constant inquisition I was indebted to the dust, grime and sweat that covered me. It blurred out all distinction between myself and the peasants, ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... and the keen old eyes were suddenly blurred and dim. "I want to thank you. One is apt to forget—when one is very lonely—that we've most of us worn love's crown just once—if only for a few moments of our lives. . . . And it's good to be reminded of it, even though it may ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... eye at the window, all blurred with the clinging shreds of the storm. "I don't see how I can get out in this awful storm nohow," she said. "I've got rheumatism now. Why can't he go to see 'em all, ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... group, heedless of being observed; busy with some activity; dragging some apparatus, it seemed. They pulled and tugged at it, moving it along with them until they were lost to sight, faded in the arriving dawn and blurred by the white line of breakers on the ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... covertly; and he praised the song and singer briskly; and sighed again, with his fingers on the stem of his glass. And by this time Devereux had drawn the window-curtain, and was looking across the river, through the darkness, towards the Elms, perhaps for that solitary distant light—his star—now blurred and lost in the storm. Whatever his contemplations, it was plain, when he turned about, that the dark spirit was ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... that the Cruiser "Des Moines" steamed in from the Arctic? Every doughboy on the island rushed to the Dvina's edge. They stood in great silent throat-aching groups, looking with blurred eyes at the colors that grandly flew to the breeze. And then as the jackies gave them a cheer those olive drab boys answered till their throats were hoarse. That night they sat long in their tents—it was not dusk even at ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... round towards the east, where the houses formed a blurred mosaic of cream, slate, indigo, and dull reds and browns, above which slender rose-flushed spires and towers pierced the haze, stained in countless places by pillars of black, grey, and amber smoke, and lightened by plumes and jets of silvery steam, ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... and discovered a few sheets of music which had slipped down upon the wires. The sheets were dusty, stained with age, blurred by damp, but one bore the name "Henriette" written in the corner in a large, defiant hand. Joining the fragments, they found it was an arrangement in manuscript of Poe's ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... morn I saw her pass The lone lake's blurred and quivering glass; Her trailing veil of amber mist The unbending beaded clover kissed; And straight I hasted to waylay Her coming by the willowy way;— But, swift companion of the Dawn, She left her footprints ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... to bear it," said Nan. She was looking at the darkening woods and her wet eyes blurred them more than the falling dusk. "It isn't healthy. It isn't right. I want you to want things like fury, and I don't know whether I should care so very much if you banged yourself up pretty well not getting ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... had come into the eye, but there is not yet distinctness of outline nor sense of magnitude, which must be acquired by practice. The eye has not yet been educated, and it was only because these blurred figures were in motion that he knew they were not trees. 'After that He put His hands upon his eyes and made him look up,' or, as the Revised Version has it with a better reading, 'and he looked steadfastly,' with an eager straining ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... could find a reply another "Coo-ee" reached them, followed quickly by some words that were blurred by the distance. Seth started. The voice had a curiously familiar sound. He glanced at Rube, and the old man's face wore a look ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... 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, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... figure is clearly discernible; but parts of the outline have become blurred and irregular. Tradition says that all the figures once had black heads—the only attempts at the introduction of a second colour—but no traces of the black heads are now visible. They must have succumbed to the tender but irresistible assaults of Time ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... roused in her. He stood in the light of the hall lamp, a fat man, a soft hat pushed to the back of his head, a bag in one hand. His face was weak and good-tempered, his eyes had once been fine but now they were dim and blurred; there were dimples in his fat cheeks; he wore on his upper lip a ragged and untidy moustache and he had two indeterminate chins. His expression was mild, kindly, now a little ashamed, now greatly indignant. It was a pity, as he often said, that he had not more control ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... feeling half stunned. The one thought which seemed to stand out clear above a tangle of others, all blurred and muddled, in his brain, was that these troubles—the attack on the Black Tor, and the hundred times more terrible one upon Cliff Castle— were caused by him. Certainty Ralph Darley had something to do with it, but he was badly wounded ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... try to find my ball, leaving Celia and George in the ravine behind me. My last glimpse of them showed me that her ball had fallen into a stone-studded cavity in the side of the hill, and she was drawing her niblick from her bag as I passed out of sight. George's voice, blurred by distance to a monotonous murmur, followed me until I was out ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... telescopic screen Tanith looked like any picture of any Terra-type planet from space, with cloud-blurred contours of seas and continents and a vague mottling of gray and brown and green, topped at the pole by an icecap. None of the surface features, not even the major mountain ranges or rivers, were yet distinguishable, ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... before it could die on his lips. The face of the unforgettable President sprang into his mind as startling as a coloured photograph, and he remarked this difference between Sunday and all his satellites, that their faces, however fierce or sinister, became gradually blurred by memory like other human faces, whereas Sunday's seemed almost to grow more actual during absence, as if a man's painted portrait should ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... the funeral was one of ghostly gloom. The November wind swept icily over the sea with a dreary wail of winter; the cold rain beat its melancholy drip, drip; sky and earth and sea were all blurred ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... said with a travel-tired smile - Who shall lift the years O! - She said with a travel-tired smile, Half scared by scene so strange; She said, outworn by mile on mile, The blurred lamps wanning her face the while, "O Love, I am here; I am with you!" . . . Ah, that there ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... Mary Louise went into the library and, drawing a chair to where the light of the student lamp flooded her book, tried to read. But the words were blurred and her mind was in a sort of chaos. Mamma Bee had summoned Aunt Polly and Uncle Eben to her room, where she was now holding a conference with the faithful colored servants. A strange and subtle atmosphere ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... wonderful human panorama which he loved to watch. The hushed reading room where he had passed so many contented hours was haunted by a presence that obscured the printed page. He would find himself staring absently at an open book, the words blurred and overlaid with mental pictures of Lone Moose, of Sophie sitting on the creek bank, of his unfinished church, forlorn and gaunt in the winter snows and the summer silences, of Tommy Ashe trudging across the meadow, ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... drew on, Magic came stealing down the blurred highways. Lamps became lanterns, shedding a muffled light, deepening and charging with mystery the darkness beyond. Old friends grew unfamiliar. Where they had stood, fantastic shapes loomed out of the mist ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... case. At the sound of her voice Von Barwig started as if he had been shot, and with a half articulate cry he turned and gazed in the direction from whence the voice came. He saw in the dim twilight, for the sun had now nearly gone down, the half-blurred vision of a young lady dressed in the height of fashion. Her features he could not distinguish, as her back was to the window, but he could see that she was a handsome young woman of about twenty years of age. As Von Barwig turned toward ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... it was he; knew, therefore, that her destiny was come, and, most extraordinary of all, in the shape of her good father's literary bureau! Yet what shock there was next day, when the hero of her dreams came to her with his ordinary pale-gray eyes, blurred somewhat and inclined ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... the Isles of Aeolus, and the rain dashing on the glass as ruthlessly as it well could have done, if, instead of Aeolic Isles and many-tinted crags, the window had fronted a dearer shore beneath a northern sky, and looked across the grey Firth to the rain-blurred ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... shame that she could even involuntarily have wished for her husband's aid, and an overwhelming consciousness of the readiness and boldness of his falsity. She saw the face of Grant Herman, nobly instinct with truth in every line, and, as he turned at her husband's word, everything blurred before her vision. She believed she was going to faint, and she rallied all her self-command to hold herself steady. The lights danced, and the sound of voices faded as into the distance. Then, with a supreme effort of will, she rallied, and ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... story is short and somewhat blurred. Tish having broken her glasses, Aggie being, as one may say, hors de combat, and I having developed a frightful headache in the dust and bad air, the real meaning of what was occurring did not penetrate to any of us. The priest officiated from ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... offered him one, and he applied it to the gas-fixture which extended its jointed arm above an ash dressing-table with a blurred mirror fixed between two standards. Having performed this office with an air of detachment designed to make Woburn recognize it as an act of supererogation, he turned without a word and ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... working in us, around us, on us, and for us—a living Christ. 'This Man whom God raised up from the dead saw no corruption,' the others move away from us like figures in a fog, dim as they pass into the mists, having a blurred half-spectral outline for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... mottled board covers lay open on the table before her, and sometimes she wrote in it with feverish haste and absorption, and sometimes she rested her chin in the cup of her palm, and with the pencil poised in the other hand looked dreamily out on the village, its huddle of roofs and steeples all blurred into positive beauty ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin |
