"Blear-eyed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in answer to the summons an old, wrinkled, blear-eyed hag made her appearance with the liquor. This old wretch was the 'landlady' of the house; she had been a celebrated and beautiful courtezan in her day, but age and vice had done their work, and she was now an object hideous to look upon. ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... says (Hom. xiv in Ezech.) that Lia who was blear-eyed but fruitful signifies the active life: which "being occupied with work, sees less, and yet since it urges one's neighbor both by word and example to its imitation it begets a numerous offspring of good ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... between the fat, ruddy host, open-mouthed, blear-eyed, and the frolicking slender page, who delights in his tricks and covers his victim with jesting compliments, is extremely well described. Wilton finds his man "counting his barrels, and setting the price in chalke ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... been attended to, the travellers entered the house, where they found Pierre, the proprietor, dozing on his bar; a bloated, blear-eyed creature, who evidently would have much preferred making them drunk with his vile whisky to preparing them any pretence for a dinner. But they firmly declined his liquor, so muttering unintelligibly to himself he shambled off ...
— The Young Woodsman - Life in the Forests of Canada • J. McDonald Oxley
... the way the boys hold out before they strike it, somethin' awful pretty in the face o' rocks, an' clay an' alkali. Oh, Lord, what a life it is anyway! They eat dirt, they sleep in dirt, they breathe dirt 'til their backs are bent, their hands twisted an' warped. They're all wind-swept an' blear-eyed I tell you, an' some o' them jest lie down in their sweat beside the sluices, an' they don't never rise up again. I've seen 'em there!" She paused reminiscently; then, pointing to the keg, she went on haltingly: ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... my mind, I come to the Zoo, and fancy they don't pass the gate. I recognize my friends, my enemies, in countless cages. I entertained the eagle, the vulture, the old billy-goat, and the black-pated, crimson-necked, blear-eyed, baggy, hook-beaked old marabou stork yesterday at dinner; and when Bob's aunt came to tea in the evening, and asked him what he had seen, he stepped up ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... but a few lines just to tell me how that good sagacious man your father is—that kind dainty body your mother—that strapping chiel your brother Douglas—and my friend Rachel, who is as far before Rachel of old, as she was before her blear-eyed sister Leah. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... a man and a woman—a teamster out of work or with his wages for the day, and with him a creature—a blear-eyed, slatternly looking woman, in a filthy calico gown. The man clutches her arm, as they sing and stagger up past the cafes. The woman holds in her claw-like hand a half-empty bottle of cheap red wine. Now and then they stop and share it; the man staggers on; the woman leers and dances ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... infinity of anxious yet meaningless lines, and its dim spectacled eyes, so plainly overtaxed by the effort to discern anything clearly, might have belonged to any old village priest grown childish and blear-eyed in the solitude of stupid books. Even the blotches of tell-tale colour on his long nose were not altogether unclerical in their suggestion. A poor old man he seemed, as he stood blinking in the electric light of the strange, warm apartment—a ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... coach drove up the inn-yard of some large coachmaster; but few words were said, and I was consigned to the coachman of one of the country stages, with as little remorse and as little ceremony as if I had been an ugly blear-eyed pug, forwarded in a basket, labelled "this side uppermost," to an old maiden aunt, or ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... waste of time. But to drink at the stoup of beauty; to lift the leafy coverlet of earth and seek the cradled God (since here, if anywhere, He dwells), this in the world's eye is waste of time. Oh, filthy, heavy-handed, blear-eyed world, when will you wash ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... the blight. Timoleus, the gay satirist of the first two acts, who scoffed at the pious hypocrisies and money-grubbing ways of the great Roman lords, is grown old and fat and blear-eyed and racked with disease in the third, has lost his stately purities, and watered the acid of his wit. His life has suffered defeat. Unthinkingly he swears by Zeus—from ancient habit—and then quakes with fright; for a fellow-communicant is passing by. Reproached by a pagan ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... you take me for a blear-eyed mole, that never seed the light of a man's eyes?" inquired Blundell, closely approaching the beset tradesman, and taking him leisurely by the neck. "Do you want to take a summerset through that window, old fellow, that you try to stuff us with such tough stories? If you ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... candle, and vividly pictured to himself his grandfather, Konstantin Makarych, who was night-watchman at Messrs. Zhivarev. He was a small, lean, unusually lively and active old man of sixty-five, always smiling and blear-eyed. All day he slept in the servants' kitchen or trifled with the cooks. At night, enveloped in an ample sheep-skin coat, he strayed round the domain tapping with his cudgel. Behind him, each hanging its head, walked the old ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... roses; his shrunken nether limbs were cased in silken hose of a pale lavender hue, and silver buckles fastened the tufted purple ribbons on his shoes. On his breast was the red cross of St. James—patent of nobility; had it not been for that and his fine attire he might have passed for a blear-eyed and decrepit ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... that steals the wits even of the wise"; in Ares he embodied the lust of war; in Athene, wisdom; in Apollo, music and the arts. The pangs of guilt took shape in the conception of avenging Furies; and the very prayers of the worshipper sped from him in human form, wrinkled and blear-eyed, with halting pace, in the rear of punishment. Thus the very self of man he set outside himself; the powers, so intimate, and yet so strange, that swayed him from within he made familiar by making them distinct; converted their shapeless terror into the beauty of visible form; ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... girls to glut the lust of godless libertines. Its sign was the ligniyoni, its ideal the almighty dollar. Through its feculent columns Muckle- mouthed Meg and Doll Tearsheet made assignations with forks-of-the-creeks fools, while blear-eyed bummers and rotten-livered rounders requested respectable women to meet them at unfrequented places and wear camp-meeting lingerie. The ICONOCLAST compelled its unrespected contemporary to purify its "personal column"—and this service to society has never been forgiven by the bench- legged hydrocephalous ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... darkly; wink, blink, nictitate; squint; look askant^, askant askance^; screw up the eyes, glare, glower; nictate^. dazzle, loom. Adj. dim-sighted &c n.; myopic, presbyopic^; astigmatic, moon-eyed, mope-eyed, blear-eyed, goggle-eyed, gooseberry-eyed, one-eyed; blind of one eye, monoculous^; half-blind, purblind; cock-eyed, dim-eyed, mole- eyed; dichroic. blind as a bat &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of statuary just received from Italy, the property of a well-known merchant. Envy did not move quickly enough. The old love of beauty and nature, which envy, detraction, greed of gain, and their blear-eyed companions, had kept in thrall, was already in a freer state; and found in good-will, ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... of uneven footsteps made the poor widow start to her feet, and Sally to cry out. The next moment the door was rudely shaken, and then Jim staggered into the room, haggard, blear-eyed, muttering to himself savagely. The sight of his mother and sister seemed partially to sober him, for the spirit within him bowed instinctively before the beauty of holiness, which neither poverty nor terror could obliterate from the face of those ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson
... whom Don Francesco had called "not exactly a liberal." He tallied with that description. A wicked old face! He was blear-eyed, brown as a mummy, and so fat that his legs had long ago ceased to be any use save as a precarious support while standing. He rode, in gorgeous apparel, on a milk-white donkey which was led by two pretty choristers in blue. Attached to the end of a long pole, a green umbrella of Gargantuan ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... who forge as with one stroke the constitution that is to be a basis of their laws—are we not provided with a mirror that reflects every lineament with the true disposition of light and shade? If it is a stern, it is yet a truthful, mirror. It flatters neither those who made it nor those blear-eyed maskers, who, forgetful of their own distorted visages, look in askance, and are able to see nothing to admire in the sober, bright-eyed faces of their fathers who gaze down upon them ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... the boys in old days at a coffee-house, he would shout and laugh louder than anybody there, and have all the waiters skipping round him; it was quite painful to see how humble and civil he was to John of the Tapioca, a blear-eyed old attendant in dingy stockings and cracked pumps, whose business it was to serve glasses of wafers, and bumpers of ink in pewter, and slices of paper to the frequenters of this dreary house of entertainment, where nothing else seemed to be consumed. As for William Dobbin, whom he had tipped ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... now in a position to claim the poor defendant's whole herd, though he generously says he will not insist on his refunding those cows which do not resemble the original heifers, and are not, as they were, dun and red and white. This sounded magnanimous, and met with grunts of approval until the blear-eyed defendant remarked, hopelessly, "They are all of those colors," which changed the sympathies of the audience once more. Tevula saw this at a glance, and hastened to improve his position by narrating an anecdote. No words of mine could reproduce the dramatic talent that man displayed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... earliest products of mental evolution, whereas their own attitude in the matter affords painful proof that it is one of the latest. They will understand some day that a steatopygous "Hottentot Venus" is no more beautiful because an African finds her attractive, than an ugly, bloated, blear-eyed harlot is beautiful because she pleases a ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... and mixed with a few drops of some liquid from a bottle which he procured from its hiding place under the flooring, banished the make-up stain from his face, his neck, his wrists, and hands as if by magic. It was a strange metamorphosis that had taken place—the coarse, brutal-featured, blear-eyed, leering countenance of Larry the Bat was gone, and in its place, clean-cut, square-jawed, clear-eyed, was the face of Jimmie Dale. And where before had slouched a slope-shouldered, misshapen, flabby creature, ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard |
