"Blur" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... overpowering, the audience noisy, and overhead the electric fans, which hung downwards from the ceiling, whirled above the spectators with so swift a rotation that those looking up saw only a vague blur in the air. The ring had been roped off upon the stage, and about three sides of the ring chairs for the privileged had been placed. The fourth side was open to the spectators in the hall, and behind the ropes at the back ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... not see the glance, and before long he was incapable of seeing anything saving the flash of the disk, the blur of the alternate colors as they spun together. He paid no heed to the path of the sunlight as it stretched along the floor under the window and told of a westering sun. The first Terry knew of it he was standing in a warm pool of gold, but he gave the sun ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... to the end of the block and turned into Lexington Avenue just as the six-o'clock whistles began to blow. So much I remember very distinctly, but after that all is an indistinct blur of clanging street-cars, of jostling crowds. I do not know whether I had lost my senses from the physical agony I was enduring, though still able to perform the mechanical process of walking, or whether it was a ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... and spin, or spiral down, and a few have even landed themselves. Also, if the plane started down from twenty thousand, the pilot wouldn't be too far blacked out. The odds are he'd come to when he got into thicker air—admitting he did blur out, which is only an Air Force guess. I don't see why they're so positive Mantell died before he hit the ground—unless they know ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... dark they softly stir, Till arrowy dawn the shadow-blur Dispels—God's tingling kiss of morning On oak and ...
— Song-waves • Theodore H. Rand
... suburb of the north, And reached a spot whence three close lanes led down, Beneath thick trees and hedgerows winding forth Like deep brook channels, deep and dark and lown: The air above was wan with misty light, 5 The dull grey south showed one vague blur of white. ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... Coltman meant when he said that the antelope had not begun to run. At the first shot every animal in the herd seemed to flatten itself and settle to its work. They did not run—they simply flew across the ground, their legs showing only as a blur. The one I killed was four hundred yards away, and I held four feet ahead when I pulled the trigger. They could not have been traveling less than fifty-five or sixty miles an hour, for they were running in a ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... fruit and flowers, messengers with late orders from the stores, repeated farewells, to the squalling babies in the steerage. Even in the impudent shrieking tugboats he found a measure of delight; and the blur ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... disposed to the best advantage all over the house, but Mrs Verloc's mother was confined to two back rooms on the first floor. The luckless Stevie slept in one of them. By this time a growth of thin fluffy hair had come to blur, like a golden mist, the sharp line of his small lower jaw. He helped his sister with blind love and docility in her household duties. Mr Verloc thought that some occupation would be good for him. His spare time he occupied by ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... yelped in horror. Penrod made a wild effort to hold him; but Duke was not to be detained. Unnatural strength and activity came to him in his delirium, and, for the second or two that the struggle lasted, his movements were too rapid for the eyes of the spectators to follow—merely a whirl and blur in the air could be seen. Then followed a sound of violent scrambling and Penrod sprawled alone at the ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... open. The thick, wet fog came pouring in like smoke. I moved up boldly through the heavy smother and looked down into the field. There was the blur of the small coop, but ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... better, and had been once to the chapel, when up the three flights of stairs Perry came and along the hall till he stopped at Room No. 102. There was a telegram for Richard, who took it with trembling hands and read it with a blur before his eyes and something at his heart like a blow, but which was born of a sudden hope that, after many days and months and years of waiting, God had deigned to be merciful. But only for a brief moment did this hope buoy him up. It could not be, he said; and yet, as he made his ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... indulged in, not made the pretext for a debauch. If one has achieved a new cottage, for example, let him take numerous week-end vacations from it. And let not an author sit down and read through his own book the moment it comes from the binder. A few more months will suffice to blur the memory of those irrevocable, nauseating foundry proofs. If he forbears—instead of being sickened by the stuff, no gentle reader, I venture to predict, will be more keenly and delicately intrigued by ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... of several minutes the same conversation was repeated. Suddenly a sharp toot sent the echoes scudding back and forth among the hills. A moment later the small transport, with the usual blur of khaki in her bows, ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... observations on the people, the aspect of the country, and other trifles; I scarcely now know what: but I have wandered into a subject so vast, so interesting, so sublime, that all petty individual remarks sink before it. Nor will I for the present blur the majesty of the picture, by ill-placed, mean, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... upon the ball, and a louder roaring answered from the stern. A needle quivered and swung over on a dial as their speed increased. Beneath them was a blur of whirling white; ahead was an upthrust mountain range upon which they were driving. And Harkness thrilled with the sense of power that his fingers held as he gently raised the ball and nosed the ship upward ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... of looking again at that terrible mass of heads and eyes, all watching me, like some fabulous dragon, brought back the sickening panic. But, queerly enough, when my eyes did move across them, I saw only a dark, impersonal blur, and then the one face. It appeared, in the indefiniteness around it, singularly near and distinct. He was looking at me with that gentle, sweet expression which my sick fancy hinted he never showed except when ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... lunged forward again, swinging the now deadened right arm at the blur Corrigan made in front of him. Something collided with him—a human form—and thinking it was Corrigan, clinching with him, he grasped it. The momentum of the object, and his own weakness, carried him back and down, and with the object in his grasp ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... office buildings. But over the end of the street the lead-coloured sky was rifted a little. A long, faint bar of light stretched across the prospect, and silhouetted against this rose a sombre mass, unbroken by any lights, rearing a black and formidable facade against the blur of light ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... been the most scholarly, or the most successful in popular esteem, or even the most handsome, but she had some quality that differentiates her in our thinking from all others. Others may seem but a sort of blur in our memory, but not so this one. She alone is distinct, distinctive, ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... couldn't he hear Cadman? Cadman had the gun. But if he himself could only reach her before the snake—if he could only— And a soft blur of sun-melted red loomed ahead ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... science had built upon spatial perception. He wished the lay intellect to revert to a pious idiocy in the presence of Nature, lest consideration of her history and laws should breed "mathematical atheists"; and the outer world being thus reduced to a sensuous dream and to the blur of immediate feeling, intelligence and practical faith would be more unremittingly employed upon Christian mythology. Men would be bound to it by a necessary allegiance, there being no longer any rival object left ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... dream of my intent, Will he not wake, and in a desperate rage Post hither, this vile purpose to prevent? This siege that hath engirt his marriage, This blur to youth, this sorrow to the sage, This dying virtue, this surviving shame, Whose crime will bear ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... horrors. His bloody base mind is all a blur with gore. But he is resolute in evil still. At the end he sees too late that he ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... ravine and, throwing herself face downwards on the ground, crawled to the edge. For an instant she closed her eyes, shrinking with a sick dread from what they might show her—Tony's young, lithe body lying broken on the rocks below, or, perhaps, only the dark blur of some awful and unmeasured depth which would never give up ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... big house lay the village and its churches: thither was tame virtue. But westward lay a broad field stretching off to an orchard, and beyond swelled a gentle hill, mellow in the distance. Still more remotely far, at the hill's rim, was a blur of woods beyond which the sun went down each night. This, in the little boy's mind, was the highway to the glad free Life of Evil. Many days he looked to that western wood when the sky was a gush of colour behind its furred edge, perceiving all manner of allurements to ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... bakneesh hanging over his tent flap, and the words she had scrawled with the end of a charred stick, "In honor of the living." That meant him. Something thick and uncomfortable rose in his throat, and a blur that was not caused by snow or wind filled his eyes. She had made a magnificent fight. And she had won. And it suddenly occurred to him that what she had said in the note was true, and that Scottie Deane could easily have killed him. The next moment he wondered why he had not done ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... An expression of stupid amazement came over Friday's face. The design of asteroid and planets wavered into a blur as the Hawk fought unconsciousness; a short, harsh sound came from his lips; he lurched uncertainly. The negro crumpled up and stretched out on the deck. Carse's desire to sleep grew overpowering. Once ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... lens, called its spherical aberration, which is due to the fact that the circumferential and central rays have not the same focus. The human eye labours under a similar defect, and from this, and other causes, it arises that when the naked light from fifty cells is looked at the blur of light upon the retina is sufficient to destroy the definition of the retinal image of the carbons. A long list of indictments might indeed be brought against the eye—its opacity, its want of symmetry, ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... away, not to see anything, with the mind's eye or any other, for a blur came over both. She was no fainter; she was strong of mind and body; but the one and the other were shaken; and for that bit of time, and it was several minutes, her senses performed no office at all. And when consciousness of distinct things ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... she had passed into a stage of existence which was like a dream, more poignant and real than life. There was the old gray house with its sloping eaves. Amid the blur of green, and dimly, she saw familiar faces and heard voices as if they came from far across the fields, and Edmond was holding her. Her dead Edmond; her living Edmond, and she felt the beating of his heart ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... training is a discipline compelling us to DWELL on that which is presented to us, to discover what unites it to other objects and what differentiates it from them. To the untrained mind creation is a blur. The moral effect on a child of teaching it to express distinction by ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... Berne. In the right picture two women are chatting, with arms akimbo, over its basin; before the plate for the left picture is got ready, "one shall be taken and the other left"; look! on the left side there is but one woman, and you may see the blur where the other is melting into thin air as she ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... do be careful!" I muttered, picking it up, and noticing the great blur it left on the ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... time, or if your eyes need glasses to make them see clearly, and you haven't them on, this little muscle becomes tired. Then the print of your book, or your writing, or the stitches you have taken begin to blur before your eyes. Your eyes begin to feel tired, and your head begins to ache. This is ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson
... looked at the square-rigged ship, now on the port quarter—an ill-defined blur to his imperfect vision. "Fine chance we'd have had," he muttered, "if that happened to be a bulldog. Angel," he said, as the mate drew near, "hot coffee is good for moon-blindness, taken externally, as a blistering ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... then turned on a valve so that with a hissing sound additional gas rushed into the bag. Jack pulled a lever. The big motors roared and a queer, sickly smell of burned gas filled the air. The propellers began to revolve slowly and then increased their speed till they became a mere blur. ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... frustrated and desperate composure of the man who can only be of use while he is sitting still and keeping his head. The vision screen was now a blur of writhing mist, lighted by the sun and torn at by emptiness. There was luminosity where the ships had encountered each other. It was sunshine upon thin smoke. It was like the insanely enlarging head of a newborn comet, whose tail would be formed presently by light-pressure. ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... he had loved about this world was its leisure. What he had hated about his own world above was its constantly increasing speed. Like a squirrel caught in a cage, his world had gone faster and faster until reality had vanished into a mad blur of turning wheels and running feet. Oh, well, he thought, a man is like a pup. Contented enough until life takes him by the scruff of the neck and shakes him up and proves to him that things change and a pup's world changes and he had better ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... together the marks are! Unfortunately, that's about all we're likely to deduce from them, and I doubt if a finger-print expert will be able to help us. Observe, there are no finger-prints—merely faint marks of the middle of the fingers, and a kind of blur for the thumb. But the thing ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... undercurrent of a dream. The dream had come to her many springs ago; and as Flossie grew plumper and rosier it grew plump and rosy too. To be married (to a person hitherto unspecified in fancy, whose features remained a blur or a blank), to be the mistress of a dear little house (the house stood out very clear in Flossie's fancy), and the mother of a dear little girl (a figure ever present to her, complete in socks and shoes and all the delicious ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... bottom, a bright blanket beneath him and his fair head pillowed on a roll of leaves. A shelter of boughs hid his face, and for one moment her heart stopped while the river and the woods, the people and the boats whirled together in a senseless blur. ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... the sweetest light. Elsewhere colour mars the simplicity of light; but there colour is effaced, not as men efface it, by a blur or darkness, but by mere light. The bluest sky disappears on that shining edge; there is not substance enough for colour. The rim of the hill, of the woodland, of the meadow-land, of the sea—let it only be far enough—has the same absorption of colour; and even the dark things drawn upon the bright ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... a sombre half-light, like a fog, spreading downward from the great north light in the sloping roof. The window was still wide open, the stretcher showed a pale gray blur. Vandover was about to light the gas when he checked himself, his arm still raised above his head. Ah, no; he did not dare to look at the result of his day's work. It would be better to start in afresh from the beginning. He found the chamois skin on the tray of the easel and rubbed out all the ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... that she would come. Yet when he saw the white blur of her gown against the blackness of the bushes, his heart leaped. All through the ages men have waited for women in gardens—"She is coming, my own, my sweet——" and farther back, "Make haste, my beloved," and in the beginning, as Mandy could ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... pillars. I can scarcely describe my feelings at that time now, but I think my nerves were in a condition similar to that of the small boy when he makes his first speech at school. They had reached the meadow, and were coming up the slow incline. I could see nothing as yet but a straw hat, a white blur beneath it, and a brown travelling suit. Through the wide-open yard gate they rolled. Then those who had been called together to welcome her gave cheer after cheer, and waved their hands and hats ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... sewing-machine. When Peter tired of lying on his tummy on the dining-room floor, trying to draw things on a bit of slate or paper, he liked to turn his head and watch the cloth moving swiftly under the jigging needle, and the wheel turning so fast that it made an indistinct blur, and sang with a droning hum. He could see, too, a corner of his mother's bed with the patchwork quilt on it. The colors of the quilt were pleasantly subdued in their old age, and the calico star set in a square pleased Peter immensely. He thought it ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... the blur ahead of them detached itself from the surrounding darkness, until even skeptical Tom and Billy knew that what they saw was a body of men bearing ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... is too great for him, and he lets go. Before reaching the end of the track the operator moves the front rudder, and the machine lifts from the rail like a kite supported by the pressure of the air underneath it. The ground under you is at first a perfect blur, but as you rise the objects become clearer. At a height of 100 feet you feel hardly any motion at all, except for the wind which strikes your face. If you did not take the precaution to fasten your hat before starting, you have probably lost it by this time. The operator moves a lever: ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright
... composition and form, that constitutes her appeal and gives it the supreme heroic grace. The chariot of fire favours fusion rather than promotes analysis, and leaves much of that first June picture for me, doubtless, a great accepted blur of violet and silver. The various hours and successive aspects, the different strong passages of our reverse process, on the other hand, still figure for me even as some series of sublime landscape-frescoes— if the great Claude, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... All was blur, hurry, confusion, tumult. Yet I remember, as we pressed onwards with the stream and part of it, certain sharp outlines. I caught here and there a glimpse of a pale scared face at a window, a half-clad form at a door, of the big, ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... him at Venice. The day was associated in his mind with the ridiculous and mortifying episode of the cigars—the expensive cigars that Susy had wanted to carry away from Strefford's villa. Their brief exchange of views on the subject had left the first blur on the perfect surface of his happiness, and he still felt an uncomfortable heat at the remembrance. For a few hours the prospect of life with Susy had seemed unendurable; and it was just at that moment that he had found ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... the ZX-1, barren, now, of life, dropped away, speeding ever due west; the hazy dots and blur of smoke which denoted the motionless Black Fleet vanished. But Chris was in contact with the fleet's flagship once more, through the compact radio-telephone set of his scout. As he flew, his eyes fixed steadily on ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall
... had a nickel he'd let us have a glass of ice cream soda with two spoons. He was such a pleasant man. But what did Mr. Jerry mean," she returned to her mutton with a suddenness that made Miss Thorley blur a line, "when he said you were under the spell of ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... ecstasy or sorrow, a blind outcry of thanksgiving or of bitterness, or they are the clumsy expression of some practical truth, as, the wisdom of acquiescence, and the futility of preoccupation with evil. But taken seriously and literally such statements are simply untrue to the facts and blur our fundamental perceptions. If actually accredited, either would lead to quiescence; if everything were equally good or evil all striving would be meaningless, one might as well jump from a housetop or walk into the fire. But as a matter of fact such mystical assertions ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... in the general text, the text that, from his momentary street-corner, showed as a great grey page of print that somehow managed to be crowded without being "fine." The grey, however, was more or less the blur of a point of view not yet quite seized again; and there would be colour enough to come out. He was back, flatly enough, but back to possibilities and prospects, and the ground he now somewhat sightlessly covered was the ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... with the loaded coach and the cab going through the central arch, and the blur of the hurrying throng darkening the small lateral ones! A fine old structure,—always reminds a Bostonian of the old arch over which the mysterious Boston Library was said still to linger out its existence late into the present century. But where are the spikes on which the rebels' ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... lie beside me in the even, On my deep couch heaped of balsam fir, Fragrant with sleep as nothing under heaven, Let the past and future mingle in one blur; While all the stars were watchful and thereunder Earth breathed not but took their silent light, All life withdrew and wrapt in a wild wonder Peace fell ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... All my history, Bible and English, came to me through picture-books. I wept tenderly over the endangered eyes of Prince Arthur, yet I put out the eyes of many kings, princes, and governors who incurred my displeasure, scratching them with pins till only a white blur remained on ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... in his heart and forcing back the tears from his eyes. Prairie wolves must not cry like little girl babies—and sometimes when his heart was sorest, a clear, dazzlingly bright day would dawn, and far, far off he could see the blur of the mainland coast, resting on the sea like an enormous island. Then he would tell himself that, no matter what his name was, some day he would cross to that great, far country, whose snow-crowned mountain peaks he could just see ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... gathered her in his arms, and for a while I saw only his head and not her face at all, except just a blur that looked pale, and ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... forenoon in the seclusion of the sitting-room, with a book opened before him, he had been thinking hard. It was not the talk with Alice that occupied his thoughts. That rose in his mind from time to time, only as a disagreeable blur, and he refused to dwell upon it. It was nothing to him, he said to himself, what Gorringe's motives in lying had been. As for Alice, he hardened his heart against her. Just now it was her mood to try ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... nescience absolute, Not knowledge in the bud which holds a fruit Haply undreamed of in the soul's Spring-tide, Pursed in the petals Summer opens wide, And Autumn, withering, rounds to perfect ripe,— Not this,—but ignorance, a blur to wipe From human records, late it graced so much. "Truth—this attainment? Ah, but such and such Beliefs ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... perceived than they would have been had it passed in ordinary course through the post-office. Letters in the post-office are hurried quickly through the operation of stamping, so that one passing over the other while the stamping ink is still moist, will to some extent blot and blur that with which it has come in contact. He will produce some dozens taken at random, and will show that with them all such has been the case. This blotting, this smudging, is very slight, but it exists; it is always there. He will tell you that this envelope ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... on the hills, I forgive, I forget Life's hoard of regret— All the terror and pain Of the chafing chain. Grind on, O cities, grind; I leave you a blur behind. ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... speak to her, nor touch her—not even touch her busy hand with my lips, or I should "blur ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... well be avoided. Let not the possibility of general annihilation blur our perception of the task before us; above all, let us not count on the miraculous aid of chance. Hitherto, the promises of our imagination notwithstanding, we have always been left to ourselves, to our own resources. ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... a handrail: all indistinguishable. One step farther down or up, and why? But up is harder. Down! Down to this white blur; it gives before me. ...
— Some Imagist Poets - An Anthology • Richard Aldington
... indistinguishable blur marked a high, square window, some seven feet from the floor. There was but one. In all probability the door lay directly opposite. That being true, the natural inclination of a man flying down the hall in the direction we came ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... opportunity make a wild dash off into the darkness. Kut-le was so sure of her weakness and cowardice that she felt that he would be taken completely by surprise and she might elude him. With a definite purpose in her mind she was able to fight off again and again the blur ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... lights in silence as they moved nearer; saw the red-lights blur and fade into green as the vessels changed direction and headed shoreward; noted one twinkling light running far in advance of its fellows; saw it swerve and double again into red and green. That meant that the Fuor d'Italia was bearing down ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... Point village had gone out long since. Rufus's cottage, with its slip of garden on the shelf of the cliff, was no more than a faint blur of white against the towering sandstone behind. No light had shone there all the evening, for the daylight had not died till ten, and he was often in bed at that hour. The fishing fleet would be out again with the dawn if the weather held, or ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... work going through the drifts and keeping the right way over a plain that had the similarity of the sea, but the men did not falter. Jimmy Grayson was always looking into the darkness, striving to see the darker line or blur that would mark the hills, but he asked no questions. The snow ceased, and after a while low, black slopes appeared against the ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... startled, Dear?" He broke into a run and followed her, And caught her, faint with fear, Cowering and trembling as though she some evil Spirit were seeing. "What means this uncivil Greeting, Dear Heart?" He saw her senses blur. ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... he looked long and steadily into the darkness around him. Suddenly he saw her—a pale blur in the dusk. ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... without, sitting on the fence with their feet caught under the second rail, smoked in imperturbable, masculine indifference. There was, shortly, a stir within, a moving blur of figures in the opened doors, and the lanterns swung alertly to the foot of the steps, where, one by one, the bobbing lights, detached from the ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... A luminous blur became visible in the nearer sky—moving blobs of silver luminosity in the mud-brown light of the Zed-ray. A hundred or more moving silver blobs. They were taking form. The silvery phosphorescent look faded, became ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... loss was merely a blur. The revelation he had just had of the mad lust for money which had begun to possess all classes was yet so fresh and startling he could form no adequate ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... gray, against the trickling stones. They pulled the carriage curtains down, and Grandma Padgett had the oilcloth apron drawn up to her chin, while she continued to drive the horses through a slit. The rear of the wagon made a blur ahead of them. Now the 'pike sides faded from fresh green to a general dulness, and trees whispering to the rain lost their vistas and indentations of shade, and became a solid wall down which a steady pour hissed with settled monotony. ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... stream past us. The landscape was extremely beautiful, but only the more distant parts of it were visible except as a mere blur. After five or six miles we turned into a long ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... the dog-watch and took a look around. The Sovereign was a mere blur on the horizon, ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... that sour'd a milky queen— (For "bloody" all enlighten'd men confess An antiquated error of the press:) Who, rapt by zeal beyond her sex's bounds, With actual cautery staunch'd the Church's wounds! And tho' he deems, that with too broad a blur We damn the French and Irish massacre, Yet blames them both—and thinks the Pope might err! What think you now? Boots it with spear and shield Against such gentle foes to take the field Whose beckoning ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... things into music and verse, makes him the type of the poet and has added a new problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur: he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass, the tragic and the comic indifferently and without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute details, to a hair point, finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... welcoming door she stands, peering amid the squall of snow; and there in the center of the blur of light stands Tim the messenger, in aftertime the ruin ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... scene as one of the great moments of life, so subtly beautiful and dramatic, so exalted and exulting, so perfect in its very incompleteness, that not a lifetime of suffering and disappointment could blur it. And he felt exactly like the flat tyre of Janet's distinguished vernacular. Even his body was worn out, for he had had but nine hours' sleep in two nights. What a dead cinch the playwrights had. A man might as well ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... show me some live men, and took me to one of the telescopes and aimed the barrel of it in the proper direction while I focused for distance. Suddenly out of the blur of the lens there sprang up in front of me, seemingly quite close, a zigzagging toy trench cut in the face of a little hillock. This trench was full of gray figures of the size of very small dolls. They were moving aimlessly back and ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... and coming back again—buz-z-z! His notebook lying on the table was as small as a postage stamp, while the pencil in his hand was as big as an elephant's leg. How can a man write on a microscopic blur with the stump of a fir tree? He poked and prodded, and Mr. MacMahon watched for a few moments his clerk poking his note-book with the wrong end of a pencil. He silently pulled his daughter forward and made her look. After ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... one of the rudder-lines, with the result that as the cutter glided once more rapidly over the little waves she made a sharp curve to starboard, and then as the line was once more loosened, glided on straight ahead for something dim and strange that stood out before them like a blur. ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... Through a blur of tears, Susie read something of this in his face, and her hands dropped limply to her sides. Her ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... she was as gay as one of the girls themselves, and much interested in the country through which they flew. One great town after another appeared, and was left behind as they roared through the stations, seeing nothing but a blur of white faces and undecipherable letters upon a board. Hour after hour and never a stop, morning changing into afternoon, and still no slackening of that wonderful onward rush. Two o'clock, and then, just as Pixie was beginning to nod after her lunch, a sudden cry of admiration came from Mademoiselle ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... full vision came on. The planet on which they would land loomed huge before them, its north pole toward them, and its single satellite on the port side. There was no sign of any rocket-boat in either side screen, and the rear-view screen was a blur of yellow flame ...
— Genesis • H. Beam Piper
... Public Library, reading over St. Louis newspapers of last week's vintage, and never failing to glance at the death notices. For one week an advertisement under PERSONAL appeared, which every time she encountered it was sure to blur over her vision with ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... Youth Is the true age of prophecy, when Truth Stands bared in beauty, and the young blood boils To hurl us in her arms, before the blur Of time makes dim her rounded form, Or the cold blood recoils From the polluted swarm Of armed Chimeras that environ her. But worthy Age to ripened fruit shall bring The glorious blooming of its hopeful spring, And pile the garners of immortal Truth With sheaves of golden grain, To sow the world ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... front and a little to the left, used the same long, sweeping strokes as with Agatha. At each of them a warm current of air seemed to strike me, and to suffuse a thrill and glow all through me from head to foot. My eyes were fixed upon Miss Penclosa's face, but as I gazed the features seemed to blur and to fade away. I was conscious only of her own eyes looking down at me, gray, deep, inscrutable. Larger they grew and larger, until they changed suddenly into two mountain lakes toward which I seemed to be falling with horrible rapidity. I shuddered, and as I did so some deeper ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... things blur the picture; I want to get this speech thing off my hands, and I want to find a resister, a sass-back, a contrary cuss, that will argue back at me. I want to keep him nearby to remind me of old times. Why back two years ago, I used to visit old Polo ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... juncture. Not that he minded losing the set; but it seemed to him it must be patent to the whole crowd, that it was the sight, out of the tail of his eye, of a tall grey figure moving quietly along the line of chairs, which for a moment or two set earth and sky whirling, and made a confused blur of net and lines. As a matter of fact, only one of the onlookers connected Garth's loss of the game with Jane's arrival, and she was the lovely girl, seated exactly opposite the net, with whom he exchanged a smile and a word ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... lowly fallen! till shame my virtues blur, Till such an ending seem not loss, but gain! Yet o'er my heart there creeps a saddening pain, To hear them cry abroad ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... I see her," I answered; for as the man spoke I caught sight of a small dark blur, which I knew must be a ship of some sort, showing indistinctly against the somewhat lighter background of cloud behind her. She was about two miles away, and was steering a course that would carry her across our bows at a distance of about a quarter of a mile if we all held on as ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... papero. Blow (stroke) bato. Blow blovi. Blouse kitelo. Blow (of flowers) ekflori. Bludgeon bastonego. Blue blua. Bluish dubeblua. Blunder erarego. Blunt malakra. Blunt (mannered) malafabla. Blur malpurigi. Blush rugxigxi. Bluster fanfaroni. Boa boao. Boar porkviro. Board (food) nutrado—ajxo. Board (plank) tabulo. Board logxi. Boarder (house) logxanto. Boarder (school) edukato. Boarding ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... his sheep, turn the sows into the hay, beat the dog before the lion, put the cart before the horse, scratch where he did not itch, shoe the grasshopper, tickle himself to make himself laugh, know flies in milk, scrape paper, blur parchment, then run away, pull at the kid's leather, reckon without his host, beat the bushes without catching the birds, and thought that bladders were lanterns. He always looked a gift-horse in the mouth, hoped to catch larks if ever the heavens ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... opinion. He could talk freely to journalists or to merchants, could put them at their ease and get the information which he wanted. His comprehensiveness was remarkable. The strife of politicians in the foreground did not blur the distant landscape. In Russia, behind Balkan intrigues and Black Sea troubles he could see the cloud of danger overhanging the Pamirs. In Spain or Portugal he was watching and forecasting the possibilities of the white races in Africa. So his dispatches, varied and ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... spread of canvas had been observed. Whether by this apparent apathy her people hoped to lull us into a condition of equal carelessness, it is of course impossible for me to say; but, if so, they signally failed, for immediately that the barque's outline faded into an indistinct blur in the growing darkness, we went to work and shook out a reef all round, never doubting but that they were at that moment doing precisely the same thing. And our supposition was most probably correct—Ryan, indeed, who had sent for his night-glass and ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... of our village streets could not exceed for egotism the temper of a new man in the cab of a train like this one. This valkyric journey on the back of the vermilion engine, with the shouting of the wind, the deep, mighty panting of the steed, the gray blur at the track-side, the flowing quicksilver ribbon of the other rails, the sudden clash as a switch intersects, all the din and fury of this ride, was of a splendor that caused one to look abroad at the quiet, green landscape and believe that it was of a phlegm quiet beyond ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... his wise grey eyes into the handsome face and felt a thrill, an awakening, the terrible sincerity of the speaker. At times the ferocity in the eyes when he had spoken of sacrifice caused the free-lance soldier to shiver. A blur of red floated before his eyes—something of a fateful forecasting that some day the awful storm that was brewing would break, and the fanatical Brahmin in front of him would call for English blood ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... balls, bowls, horse and gun, estates and politics; but there are finer games before you. Is not time a pretty toy? Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals. Yonder mountain must migrate into your mind. The fine star-dust and nebulous blur in Orion, "the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor," must come down and be dealt with in your household thought. What if you shall come to discern that the play and playground of all this pompous history are radiations from yourself, and that the sun borrows ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Lenora turned away from the window of the hotel, out of which they had been gazing for the last quarter of an hour. Stretched out before them were the lights of the Exposition, a blur of twinkling diamonds against the black garb of night. Beyond, the flashing of a light-house and a faint ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the obliterating dusk, hung on a nodding mountain flower, unfearful above the canon's emptiness. An occasional bird ventured a boldly questioning note that lingered unfinished in the silence of indecision. Across the road hopped a young rabbit, a little rounded shadow that melted into the blur of the sage. A cold white fire, spreading behind the purple-edged ranges, enriched their somber panoply with illusive enchantments, ever changing as the dim effulgence drifted from peak to peak. Shadows grew luminous and were gone. In ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... moving ferries spilling swaying reflections in the water out of their square reddish-glowing windows. If they had been lucky, they would have seen a liner come in through the Golden Gate, growing from a blur of light to a huge moving brilliance, like the front of a high-class theatre, that towered above the ferry boats. You could often hear the thump of the screw and the swish of the bow cutting the calm ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... people who don't get things, and have to find life nice in spite of it. I'd deserted really; and father and Felicity knew I had; only I didn't know, or I'd never have done it. I only got to understand gradjully" (Lucy's long words were apt to be a blur, like a child's), "when I saw what a lot of good things Denis and his friends had, and how I had to have them too, 'cause I couldn't get away from them; and oh, Peter, I've felt smothered beneath them! They're ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... great tear on the page when she signed it; but she took the soft, embroidered sleeve of her nightgown, and dabbled it dry, so that it didn't blur the writing; and then together they slipped up-stairs. Leslie went into her aunt's room in the dark, and in a queer little voice said, "Cloudy, dear, here's a note for you." Laying it in her hand, Leslie hurried into her own room, shut her door softly, and hid in the ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... to shy; he was twisting away, trying to avoid the strange thing which lay there. I hid my head no longer. I saw the horse above me. I saw the rider glaring down. He was going to ride over me. I saw his face, a grey blur under his hat. The horse seemed to be right on top of me. I started up to my feet with a cry. The horse shied into the road, with a violence which made the rider rock. Then, throwing up his head, ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... from the abominable blur of cant, humbug, and self-seeking which surrounds everything in this present world—that is to say, supposing that I am not already unconsciously tainted myself, a result of which I have a morbid dread. I am perhaps overrating myself. You ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... Wilson in an extraordinary joint session of Congress, held on the 2d of April. In this, possibly his greatest speech, he was careful not to blur the idealistic principles which, since the spring of 1916, he had been formulating. War existed because Germany by its actions had thrust upon the United States the status of belligerent. But the American people must meet the challenge with their purpose clearly before them. "We must ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... out of the blur that had enveloped it. He was wandering aimlessly about in a familiar room. The girders of the roof above were of red-painted steel. His tool-benches were there, greasy and littered with metal filings, just as they had always been. He had a tractor to repair, and a ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... whether one or two parents contracted with society for the right upbringing of the child or children involved (with no troublesome questions asked about either parent not in evidence in the contract), would certainly blur the social outline of the family, as we know it, to the point of legal nullification. There might, indeed, grow up in such an imagined condition a form of contract between two persons mating, as ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... surprisingly, the light wavered out, leaving the schooner in stony blackness. A vague blur of complementary color swam in Madden's eyes. A gasp ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... tribe, and himself both gentle by nature and considerate of others according to his lights, which thoughtlessness might turn down or passion blur, but which burned steadily and brightly in the main, Charles Langholm felt stung to the soul by the last few words, in which Hugh Woodgate noticed nothing amiss. Steel's tone was not openly insulting, but rather that of banter, misplaced perhaps, and in poor taste ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... the scent of the night, honest, sensuous, and long—long! As I lay thus, clasped in his arms, I half closed my eyes, and looked into his eyes through my lashes, smiling, and all was a delicious blur.... ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... enjoyed in months. Oftener and oftener, as time went on, Crane found the vision of his dream home floating in his mind as he steered the Skylark in her meteoric flight or as he strapped himself into his narrow bed. Now, however, the central figure of the vision, instead of being an indistinct blur, was clear and sharply defined. And for her part, more and more was Margaret drawn to the quiet and unassuming, but utterly dependable and steadfast young inventor, with his wide knowledge and his keen, ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... There was a blur before the lady's eyes—a buzzing in her ears—and the footfall she had listened for so long was now unheard as it came slowly to her side. But the light touch upon her arm—the well-remembered voice within her ear, calling her "Madam ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... Latin and French terms, not correctly used and not even rightly spelt, his endless iterations, lists, catalogues, categories, things not clearly visualised or even remotely perceived, but swept relentlessly in, like the debris of some store-room, all these are ugly mannerisms which simply blur and encumber the pages. The question is not whether they offend a critical and cultured mind, but whether they produce an inspiring effect ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and swung into the trail, every man following him in his order. Without pausing, except for a brief half hour at noon, and another later in the day for eating, they pressed the trail, running what rapids they could and portaging the others, until in the early evening they saw, far away, a dirty blur on the skyline. ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... followed were to Michael one long blur of trouble. He haunted Mr. Endicott's office in hopes of getting some news of his return but they told him the last letters had been very uncertain. He might come quickly, and he might be delayed a month yet, or even longer; and ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... something. He got out a common sulphur match. He wet it on his lips and rubbed it on the muzzle sight: Then on each side of the notch on the breech sight. He lined it for a tree. Yes! surely! What had been a blur of blackness had ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... never do," she told herself at last, after standing some moments at the window looking across at the peak through a blur of tears,—"I must brace up and comfort Elsie." But Elsie was not to be comforted all at once, and the wheels of that ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... experience passed in the instant while she stood there, with her pulses drumming in her ears, her throat contracting until she struggled for breath, and the lights of the city swimming in a nebulous blur before her eyes. Yet in that instant, as in every crisis of her life, she turned instinctively to action, to movement, to exertion, however futile. While she walked across the pavement to the waiting cab, for the crowning and ultimate choice of her life, she abandoned ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... front of the chair, his back to the fire, and looked down upon the small figure. The blue blur of the evening gown, the exquisite whiteness of arms, neck, and face sank into his consciousness. Unconsciously he was fixing scenes in his memory, as one secures pictures in a ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... a big bright blur—the wildest vividest moment of her life. And it was only eight days later that they were in the train together, Apex and all her plans and promises behind them, and a bigger and brighter blur ahead, into which they were plunging as the "Limited" ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... who at once suggested the effects of liver after a sea voyage so tempestuous as ours had been. For the first few moments I was inclined to agree with her, and said so; but very shortly my opinion was altered by the fact that what I saw first as an indistinct blur gradually assumed a definite shape, and I then found there were six little swallows in front of me, apparently connected with each other by a waving ribbon, or so ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... the earth. The day was dark and foggy, and at first the lads could discern nothing below but a great blur. ...
— The Boy Allies with the Cossacks - Or, A Wild Dash over the Carpathians • Clair W. Hayes
... but how it affects people, how they meet it, how they fly from it: the relief of a biography is that you haven't got to invent your setting and your character—all that is done for you: you have just got to select the characteristic things, and not to blur the things that you would have wished otherwise. For God's sake, let us get at the truth in books, and not use them as screens to keep the fire off, or as things to distract one from the depressing facts in one's bank-book. I welcome all this output of novels, because ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... they did not charge me. Butter money was not accounted for, pickles and preserves missing, things about the house were going to destruction, the country was full of falsehoods and I had told them all. It was all a blur of sound and fury, but in ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... human nature, and that contrast disappears, and with it goes the distinction between divine person and divine nature. Then, instead of a transcendent personality in whose portrait divine and human features are distinctly limned, we have a blur. Where God planned a unique though intelligible psychic harmony, we find a ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... Cryptic's port side, as she lay half a mile away across the glassy water, four neat white squares in outline, a white blur in ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... in my eyes, and I am seeing things all wrong. We have anchored for the night.... I am watching the misty green blur, which is all that is left to me of India, grow more and more indistinct as darkness falls. Soon it ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... was to find himself again within the sheltering arms of the Refuge. That awakening was almost to a full and clear consciousness. It was with no confusion of thought and but little confusion of sight, except for a white mist that seemed to blur ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... himself to sport with perdition.' Those who knew most about Bulwer, and who were most repelled by his terrible faults, will feel in this page of Miss Martineau's the breath of social equity in which charity is not allowed to blur judgment, nor moral disapproval to narrow, starve, and discolour vision into lost possibilities of character. And we may note in passing how even here, in the mere story of the men and women whom she met in London drawing-rooms, Harriet Martineau does not lose herself ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley
... some degree of disappointment. Those covering the first outward and return journey between Pozieres and Le Sars were good, as were the next three, at the beginning of the second journey. Then came a confused blur of superimposed ground-patterns, and at the last five results blank as the brain of a flapper. A jamb in the upper changing-box had led to five exposures on the ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... we're wanting to hear Is what the plain facts of your christening were,— For your name—just to hear it. Repeat it, and cheer it, 's a tang to the spirit As salty as a tear;— And seeing you fly, and the boys marching by, There's a shout in the throat and a blur in the eye And an aching to live for you always—or die, If, dying, we still keep you waving on high. And so, by our love For you, floating above, And the sears of all wars and the sorrows thereof, Who gave you the name of Old Glory, and why Are we thrilled at ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... left no visible mark on the target; and Lisle did not look around as he thrust his last cartridge into the rifle. He let it lie beside him for half a minute while he opened and shut his right hand, and then, taking it up quickly, fired. Still there was no blur on the white surface of the card and Gladwyne sharply shut his glasses, while two of the onlookers ran toward the target. They came back in silence and one significantly held up the ace. There were three small holes in the ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... murmured. She lay and pressed her palms to her eyeballs, so firmly that when she removed them, the room was a blur. Maurice, standing at the window, beat a tattoo on the pane. Then, with his back to her, he began to speak. He blamed himself for what he called the folly of the past weeks. "I gave way when I should have been firm. And this is the result. You have got into a nervous, morbid state. But it's ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... delight of laugh and jest, They plied their subtle alchemy with zest— Till, sudden, high above their tumult, welled Out of the sitting-room a song which held Them stilled in some strange rapture, listening To the sweet blur of voices chorusing:— ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... canoes," explained Ja, "for the Mezops of Luana are always at war with us and would steal them if they found them," he nodded toward an island farther out at sea, and at so great a distance that it seemed but a blur hanging in the distant sky. The upward curve of the surface of Pellucidar was constantly revealing the impossible to the surprised eyes of the outer-earthly. To see land and water curving upward in the distance until it seemed to stand on edge where it melted into the distant sky, and to feel that ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... women of other novelists seem, even while they are expressing their most violent emotions, rather to blur and confuse the mysterious depths of their sex-life than to reveal it. Conrad's women, in a few broken words, in a stammered sentence, in a significant silence, have the power of revealing something more than the tragic emotion of one person. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... But once he drank of his breath, and instantly set him to fish Like a man intent upon supper at home and a savoury dish. For what should the woman have seen? A man with a torch—and then A moment's blur of the eyes—and a man with a torch again. And the torch had scarcely been shaken. "Ah, surely," Rahero said, "She will deem it a trick of the eyes, a fancy born in the head; But time must be given the fool to nourish a fool's belief." So for ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dully. Then he tossed back his head. He would not blur Lew's happy hour. He held out his hand. "I hear," he repeated, ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... fog round the first bend, they were once agreeably pink and yellow, with the magenta cornice, the blue capital, that fancy dictated. There where the way narrowed with an out-jutting balcony high up, and the fog thickened and the lights grew vague, the multitude of heads passed into the blur beyond with an effect of mystery, pictorial, remote; but where Arnold and Lindsay walked the squalor was warm, human, practical. A torch flamed this way and that, stuck in the wall over the head of a squatting bundle ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... hardly bully the chauffeur into letting her take her own car. He put all the curtains on, and she pushed forth into obfuscation like a one-man submarine. There was something of the effect of moving along the floor of the sea. The air was translucent, a little like water-depths, but everything was a blur. ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... light from the electric bulbs. There was about the darkened room some suggestion of certain chambers in the Arabian Nights, opening on a court of palms. Perhaps it was partially this memory-evoking suggestion that caused Imogen to start so violently when she saw dimly, in a blur of shadow, the figure of a man, who sat smoking in a low, deep chair before the fire. He was long, and thin, and brown. His long, nerveless hands drooped from the arms of his chair. A brown mustache shaded his mouth, and his eyes were sleepy and apathetic. When Imogen entered ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... he dreamed not. He would sit him down Thinking to work his problems as of old, And find the star he thought so plain a blur, The columned figures labyrinthine wilds Without my comment, blind and senseless scrawls That vexed him with their riddles; he would strive And struggle for a while, and then his eye Would lose its light, and over all his mind The cold gray mist would settle; and erelong ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... lively and droll as ever, with a wan face as eloquent of grief as any face I ever saw; he had it in his head that the right eye would go the same way as the left. He could no longer see the satellites of Jupiter with it: hardly Jupiter itself, except as a luminous blur; indeed, it was getting quite near-sighted, and full of spots and specks and little movable clouds—muscae volitantes, as I believe they are called by the faculty. He was always on the lookout for new symptoms, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... blur of her vision on his pony, halted, and swung down in front of the stable across the street. The horse staggered as the weight came out of the stirrup and that made Marianne watch with a keener interest, for she had seen a great deal of merciless ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... had left him contemplating the far beauties of the little blur of light that was Med, Mr. Toby Amory set a match to one of his jealously expended store of Habanas and added one more aroma to the spiced air. To be standing on the doorstep of a king's palace, confidently ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... her, but it would be too late. The news would have been passed on. The victory of the Allies and the lives of thousands of our soldiers were at stake. Next instant I had pulled out the loaded revolver and fired two shots after the vanishing figure, already only a dark blur in the dusk. I heard a scream, the crashing of the breaking cycle, and all ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sentiments; it ennobles human endeavor; it sanctifies defeat and denial; it polishes manners; it gives to morals a tincture of devotion; and, as with the spell of magic, such as Milton describes in "Comus," it dissipates with a glance the wild rout of low desires and insane follies which so much blur and blot up the otherwise fair face of human society. It permits of no meanness in its train; it expels vulgarity, and, with a high stretch toward perfected humanity, it unearths the grovelling nature, and gives it aspirations of sand ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... fields of waving wheat And leagues of golden corn The fragrance of the wild-rose bloom And elder-flower is borne; But earth's appealing loveliness We do but half surmise, For oh, the blur of battle-fields ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy |
