"Blur" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... small as a rat, or it might have been a part of something as large as a man. At any rate, it proclaimed that something in that spot was alive. At one time she saw it plainly and at other times it vanished, because her fixture of gaze caused her occasionally to greatly tangle and blur those peculiar shadows and faint lights. At last, however, she perceived a human head. It was monstrously dishevelled and wild. It moved slowly forward until its glance could fall upon the prisoner and ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... is subject to Some changes that astound me. Where'er I look I seem mistook; All objects—what, I care not— At once arrange to make a change To something that they were not! When thou art near, love, Strange things occur— Thickness is clear, love, Clearness a blur. Penguins are weasels, Cheap things are dear, "Jumps" are but measles ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 19, 1890 • Various
... 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 Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... be careful!" I muttered, picking it up, and noticing the great blur it left on the page. ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... see what happened. He saw the pennies taken from what seemed to be seven or eight in the boy's palm. When the two were taken away there seemed to be a slight blur—and there was ...
— Unthinkable • Roger Phillips Graham
... colour, 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, say, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... the woods and fields. What a comment it was on the disparity between my pursuits and my situation to receive such a letter while reading that book! However, I will not let life's mean perplexities blur from my eye the page of Plato; nor, if natural tears must be dropt, murmur at a lot, which, with all its bitterness, has given time and opportunity to cherish an even passionate ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... at her, or rather at the pale blur of her standing close to him. "Well, it's always been sort of the custom for the men to— But now that I think of it, Webber ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... 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 ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright
... clothed her; wedded her; Her Cophetua: when, lo! All the hill, one breathing blur, Burst in beauty; gleam and glow Blent ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... watched, he swept noiselessly around the drive and was soon lost in the blur of the ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... obscure definitions, which must blur the margins with interpretations and load the memory with doubtfulness: but he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with or prepared for the well-enchanting skill of ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... said, then hesitated, for she felt the color coming into her face, while a strange blur confused every object in the room. "I'm very, very sorry," she added, hastily, after a moment. "I ought not to have come. I'm not equal to this. It wouldn't take you very long to drive home with me, and then ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... bringing out the phenomenon of alternation in a still more striking manner is to look at two different sets of writing, with the two eyes. The resultant effect is a blur, due to superposition, and the inscription cannot be read with the eyes open. But on closing them, the composite image is analysed alternately into its component parts, and thus we are enabled to read better with eyes ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... railway station uneventfully, where she learned that men from the Embassy had followed on bicycles as a matter of precaution, and the travelers found their compartment and were safely installed. She sank into her place silently and looked out of the window into the blur of moving lights as Vienna was left behind them. Upon the seat opposite her sat the newly created officer of the Fifteenth Army Corps, Ober Lieutenant Carl von Arnstorf, looking rather smart in his borrowed plumage. The intimacy of their new situation did not frighten ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... never been demonstrated, but if that taxi-driver, urged on by Quin, was his counterpart, it is safe to infer that there are no traffic laws in Hades. In spite of the fact that the streets were like glass from the driving rain, and the wind-shield a gray blur, in spite of the fact that a tire went flat on a rear wheel, that decrepit old taxi rose to the occasion and made the transit ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... not have 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 ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... 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
... 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 the centre. ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... cut through the river-water and sent two rolling waves to right and to left of us. With every throb of the engines we sprang and quivered like a living thing. One great yellow lantern in our bows threw a long, flickering funnel of light in front of us. Right ahead a dark blur upon the water showed where the Aurora lay, and the swirl of white foam behind her spoke of the pace at which she was going. We flashed past barges, steamers, merchant-vessels, in and out, behind this one and round the other. Voices hailed us out of the darkness, but still the Aurora ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... bark held to his breast, Donald realized in a shock of alarm that he must have passed beyond the tree at the foot of which his pack was lying. In panic anxiety, he forced his lids apart, and strove to compel sight. It was in vain. A prismatic blur reeled before him. He could not distinguish sky from snow, or sun from tree. Only, the pain suddenly leaped with new life and flooded the useless eyeballs with stinging tears. The futility of his effort sickened the man. But, by a mighty ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... violence is done by successive interpreters to sacred writings than to any other relics of ancient literature. Ideas grow and change, yet each generation tries to find its own ideas reflected in the sacred pages of their early prophets, and, in addition to the ordinary influences which blur and obscure the sharp features of old words, artificial influences are here at work distorting the natural expression of words which have been invested with a sacred authority. Passages in the Veda or Zend-Avesta which do not bear on religious or philosophical ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... speculations may 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
... ships, while others followed. Feeling their way among unsounded bars, Heaping their freights upon the groaning wharf-heads, Filling their holds with turpentines and tars, Until the little twisting streets all vanished Into a blur of ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... liner, but no message came back. The last word from the Titanic was that she was sinking. Then the sparking became fainter. The call was dying to nothing. The Virginian's operator labored over a blur of signals. It was hopeless. So the Allan ship strove on, fearing ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... find them. The gloom and the snow had obliterated all trace of the sleigh, and at last Rallywood himself, well as he knew the country, became bewildered; but luckily the horse he rode was a charger he had had with him on the Frontier. He left it to choose its own direction, yet it was long before a blur of light which he knew to be the open doorway of the block-house grew out on ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... climb, conscious that the rapid beating of her heart was not wholly due to her recent exertion. It was the prospect of a meeting now imminent that caused the painful tumult in her side and the widening of her dark eyes as she looked up at the saffron blur which marked the position of the moon. Yet there was resolution in her step as she turned southward and took the road that passed between the college and the cliff. In spite of the long thaw, the gravelled track was firm beneath her feet, and she walked rapidly in the direction ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... hid thee in the hollow of my being? And still, because between us hung the veil, The myriad-tinted veil of sense, thy feet Refused their rest, thy hands the gifts of life, Thy heart its losses, lest some lesser face Should blur mine image in thine upturned soul Ere death had stamped it there. This was thy thought. ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... all his 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 ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... of life is not what happens, 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 ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... hollowed palms, and flattening our noses against the icy panes; but in spite of our efforts we could only discern dimly the shape of the umbrella rising like a miniature black mountain out of the white blur of the fog. The long empty street with the wind-drifts of dead leaves, the pale glimmer of the solitary light at the far corner, the steady splash! splash! of the rain as it fell on the brick pavement, the bitter draught ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... first full moon of this year's springtime. In years to come I may perchance be reminded of this night, with the tee-tee of the bird on the bank, the glimmer of the distant light on the boat off the other shore, the shining expanse of river, the blur of shade thrown by the dark fringe of trees along its edge, and the white sky gleaming overhead ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... manner, it was related that Austria had sent an ultimatum to Serbia. West had read part way through this stupid little piece of news, when suddenly the Thunderer and all its works became an uninteresting blur. ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... 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
... Admirals that ware gentlemen (for Obdam was so) because they never fought fortunatly with their ennemies when they had such. But certainly this is nought but a fiction made by a commonwealth to cast a blur upon nobility, seing thir same very states have fought most couragiously and advantagiously under the conduct of the ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... later the boy slipped into a tangle of brush that marked the upper end of his patch of timber. The bare summit of the ridge stretched away in the half-light to merge in a mysterious blur with the indistinct valley of the Ten Bow. The wind was blowing gently from the ridge and the boy figured that if the wolf pack followed the summit as he hoped, they must pass within twenty yards ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... a dim, oblong, white blot in the middle distance; a nebulous blur in the painting, as if there had been some chemical impurity in the pigment causing it to fade, or rather as if a long drop of some acid, or perhaps a splash of salt water, had fallen upon the canvas while ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... reach you sooner. Are you 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
... picturesque stretches of gleaming water, on your left, with a sail here and there and a lunatic asylum on shore; over beyond the water, on a distant elevation, you see a squat yellow temple which your eye dwells upon lovingly through a blur of unmanly moisture, for it recalls your lost boyhood and the Parthenons done in molasses candy which made it blest and beautiful. Still in the distance, but on this side of the water and close to its edge, the Monument to the Father of his Country towers out of the mud—sacred soil is ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... glorious 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... absolute that what most modern writers would regard as the illogical dreams of superannuated eccentrics he is inclined to treat with smiling reverence and infinite sympathy. Where the whole terrestrial business is only a meaningless blur upon the face of nothingness, why should we not linger by the way, under elm trees, or upon broken fragments of old temples, or on sunny benches in cloistered gardens, and listen to the arbitrary fancies of unpractical and incompetent persons whose countenances express an "audace craintive" ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... obtruding themselves on our senses. What we do not attend cannot be suddenly removed from the stage. Every change which is needed must be secured by our own mind. In our consciousness the attended hand must grow and the surrounding room must blur. But the stage cannot help us. The art of the theater has ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... Her father glanced at her curiously. "I must be a wreck. I'm sure my hair is frightful," she thought, but forgot it as she looked at him. His face was unusually pale. In the tumult of activity he had been betrayed into letting the old despondent look blur his eyes and sag his mouth. ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... Hornigold, leaning over the pier and watching the boat fade into a black blur on the water as it drew away toward ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... day of her meeting with Maurice, she ate her lunch with a glance every few minutes at her great-uncle Allan on the opposite wall. A very black portrait, it seemed only a meaningless blur till in a certain light the strong face and stern eyes shone out of the surrounding gloom with startling effect. She sometimes wondered rather anxiously if the uncle to whose home-coming she looked forward, could by any possibility be like the person for ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... hills, I forgive, I forget Life's hoard of regret— All the terror and pain of a chafing chain. Grind on, O cities, grind! I leave you a blur behind. I am lifted elate—the skies expand; Here the world's heaped gold is a pile of sand. Let them weary and work in their narrow walls; I ride with the voices of waterfalls. I swing on as one in a dream—I swing. Down the very hollows, I shout, ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... with the gilt figure of the Virgin hanging at right angles from the top like the arm of a bracket. On the hills beyond can just be made out the woods of Fricourt behind the German line. They are in the background behind Albert church tower. The white ruins of Fricourt may be the blur in the background south of them. We shall be ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... if you might have passed it through your ring, and fell in multitudes of small soft creases. Two big red roses drooped from her bodice. She wore a garden-hat, of white straw, with a big daring rose-red bow, under which the dense meshes of her hair, warmly dark, dimly bright, shimmered in a blur of ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... 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 ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... where an open space, or maidan, corresponding to a drive in an English preserve, but on the grand scale, divided it from the jungle—all our thoughts being set upon lunch—when suddenly across this open space passed a blur of yellow and black only a few yards from the nearest elephant. It was so unexpected and so quick that even the trained eyes of my companion were uncertain. "Did you see?" he asked me in a voice of hushed and wondering awe. "Could that have been ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... me. The old flame Throws out clear tokens of reviving fire:" But Virgil had bereav'd us of himself, Virgil, my best-lov'd father; Virgil, he To whom I gave me up for safety: nor, All, our prime mother lost, avail'd to save My undew'd cheeks from blur ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... moving slowly across the level stretch of ground which Tom used for starting his airships. The propeller was now a blur of light. The explosions of the motor became a steady roar, the noise from one cylinder being merged into the blast from the others so rapidly that it ...
— Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice • Victor Appleton
... silent. O silence, thou art terrible! terrible as that calm of the ocean which lets the eye penetrate the fathomless abysses below. Thou showest us in ourselves depths which make us giddy, inextinguishable needs, treasures of suffering. Welcome tempests! at least they blur and trouble the surface of these waters with their terrible secrets. Welcome the passion blasts which stir the wares of the soul, and so veil from us its bottomless gulfs! In all of us, children of dust, sons of time, eternity ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of water lay between the stage and the boat. The girl's dress remained a spot of cheerful color; her face was a blur. As the watermen swung the bows down-stream, she looked back, lifting an arm spectral in its white sheath. ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... moment there was another blow on the window, and something pounded and scratched against the glass. Both of them were looking this time, and again my father saw the hand without the little finger—but my mother could see only a blur and a movement. ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... instant there was a blur over my eyes, and Williams was singing out something that I could not catch. Then, just as quickly, it went, and I could see ...
— The Ghost Pirates • William Hope Hodgson
... every stir; every touch of the bell made her tremble; it was impossible to read, to lie down, to be quiet or still anywhere. She had set the glass of expectancy for one thing in the distance; and all things else were a blur or ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... coiled, turned colorless worms of light, went into a single vast blur. Dimly Bart saw old Rugel slump forward, moaning softly; saw the old Lhari pillow his bald head on his veined arms. Then darkness took him; and thinking it was death, Bart felt only numb, regretful failure. I've failed, we'll always fail. The ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... to determine precisely which window it had been, and turned her gaze seaward again, the boat had vanished. Its lights, at least, were no longer visible, and it was many minutes before the girl succeeded in locating the blur it made on the face of the waters. It seemed to be moving, but the distance was so great that she could not be ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... sort of ferris-wheel, except that it was revolving in a horizontal plane. The structure was completely enclosed in metal, and was whirling too fast for even the central shaft to be anything but a hazy, silver-blue blur. ...
— Minor Detail • John Michael Sharkey
... of the matchless agility of the crotalus when he cares to be quick. The cage was just twelve inches high in the clear; but before the falling mouse was halfway to the bottom, there was an indescribable gray blur, and I knew that the larger snake had hit him. I have improved numerous chances to study the stroke of rattlesnake, which is the swiftest motion made by any living creature; but that particular ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... gold-rimmed spectacles, drew a neatly folded white handkerchief from his pocket, shook it out, breathed upon the glasses, and polished them, kept on holding them to the light to make sure that there was not the symptom of a blur, and as soon as the laughter had died out ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... whole volume and outline, because, first, they could not comprehend it perfectly, and, second, because their power of expression was limited. The lenses by which they apprehended their facts were not adjusted properly, so they saw every thing with a blur. Definite outlines, cleanly cut edges, exact apprehension of volume and weight, nice measurement of relations, were matters outside of their observation and experience. They had broad minds, but bungling; and their language ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... Jack, giving one last violent wave to his handkerchief. And then he put it back in his pocket, because the crowd upon the deck of the departing Liner had now become a mere blur in the distance, and distant blurs seemed to his practical nature unworthy any further outlay of personal energy. "But oh!" he added, as he and Carter turned to quit the dock, "how the family are just agoing to ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... was blowing furiously, straight up the St Lawrence, making Quebec a partly seen blur to the nearest American patrols and the Heights of Abraham a wild sea of whirling drifts to the nearest British sentries. One o'clock passed, and nothing stirred. But when two o'clock struck at Holland House Montgomery rose and began to put the council's plan in operation. The ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... 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 would be to go further to the right. Reasoning in ...
— 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
... been asleep they did not know, as the ghost-stories have it, but both were suddenly awakened by a commotion outside. It was intensely dark inside the tent, but as the two sat up they noticed a faint moving blur of light, which made itself ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... straightened away from her and looked without seeing at the blur of light which was the phonograph. Sara Lee, glancing up, saw him then as he was in the photograph, face set and head thrust forward, and that clean-cut drive of jaw and backward flow of heavy hair that marked him all ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... into the stream and drank with eager, silent draughts, Calumet swung himself crossways in the saddle, fumbled for a moment at his slicker, and drew out a battered tin cup. Leaning over, he filled the cup with water, tilted his head back and drank. The blur in the white sky caught his gaze and held it. His ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the foulest pen, Or fairest handled by the sons of men. 'Twill also show what is upon it writ, Be it wisely, or nonsense for want of wit, Each blot and blur it also will expose To thy next readers, be they friends ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Island; the point of view the very spot at which I had landed with the captain for the first time, and from which I had re-embarked the day before we sailed. I had already been gazing for some seconds before my attention was arrested by a blur on the sea-line, and, stooping to look, I recognised the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... A wilderness of sad streets, where gaunt walls Hide nothing to desire; sunshine falls Eery, distorted, as it long had shone On white, dead faces tombed in halls of stone. The whir of motors, stricken through with calls Of playing boys, floats up at intervals; But all these noises blur to one long moan. What quest is worth pursuing? And how strange That other men still go accustomed ways! I hate their interest in the things they do. A spectre-horde repeating without change An old routine. Alone I know the days ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... looked at Robin until something arose in his eyes that made all the lights and the faces blur together. At last he said, "I thank thee, friend, from my heart, for what thou doest for me; yet, think not ill if I cannot take thy gift freely. But this I will do: I will take the money and pay my debts, and in a year and a day hence will return ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... haze, gray and tinged ruddy, lay between the houses, sometimes blowing with a little wet kiss against the face. Mrs. Wilton's hair and eyelashes and her furs were powdered with tiny drops. But there was nothing in the weather to blur the sight; she could see the faces of people some distance off and read the ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... In a blur of blue smoke it skimmed through the gap in the palings. Out upon the smooth meadowland it shot, roaring and smoking terrifically. And then, all at once, the jolting motion of the start ceased. It seemed as if the occupants of the chassis ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... to blur moral distinctions, and to obliterate plain duties, as the free indulgence of speculative habits. We must all know many a sorry scrub who has fairly talked himself into the belief that nothing but his intellectual difficulties ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... 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 ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... her, followed by frightened despair. The wilderness, in its evening hush, menaced her with huge emptinesses, utter loneliness. She worked her way to the edge of the wooded plateau. There was a lingering gleam of yellow and rose pink on the distant mountains, but the valley itself lay in a blur of shade, out of which rose the faint murmur of running water, a monotone in the silence. She sat down on a dead tree, and ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... dark patch—the hand of one who, ghostly, silent, was creeping down into the hallway—vanished and reappeared on a level with my eyes. Then a vague shape became visible; no more than a blur upon the dim design of the wall-paper... and Nayland Smith got his first ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... Marguerite Blakeney had managed to read on the half-scorched piece of paper, seemed literally to be the words of Fate. "Start myself tomorrow. . . ." This she had read quite distinctly; then came a blur caused by the smoke of the candle, which obliterated the next few words; but, right at the bottom, there was another sentence, like letters of fire, before her mental vision, "If you wish to speak to me again I shall be in the supper-room at one o'clock precisely." The whole was signed with ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... deck the officer looked round, in surprise at seeing only one person on board. Stephen had, before arriving at the port, donned a clean suit of linen trousers and jacket; his cap was out of all shape, and the badge on its front had faded into a blur; he was barefooted, and his hair had grown almost to his shoulders. The aspect of the boat was almost as surprising as that of its solitary occupant. There were no signs of paint visible, the work was rough, the stanchions of various sizes, some ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... as a shadow, as swift, Attusah is on his feet. At the back of the great niche, so high that none could conceive that it might afford an exit, a fissure lets in a vague dreary blur of light from spaces beyond. Leaping high into the air, the lithe young warrior fixes his fingers on the ledge, crumbling at first, but holding firm under a closer grasp. The elder man, understanding the ruse ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... unconscious, and that his attention, when she stole into the room, drifted away from her after a moment, made him even more of a stranger than in the nursery days when he had never come home till after dark. She seemed always to have seen him through a blur—first of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference—and now the fog had thickened till he was almost indistinguishable. If she could have performed any little services for him, or have exchanged with him a few of those affecting words which an extensive ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... 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 an ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... would thrust the miles aside, Rush up the quiet lane, and then, Just where her roses laughed in pride, Find her among the flowers again. I'd slip in silently and wait Until she saw me by the gate, And then ... read through a blur of tears Quick ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... of stupid amazement came over Friday's face. The design of asteroid and planets wavered into a blur as the Hawk fought unconsciousness; a short, harsh sound came from his lips; he lurched uncertainly. The negro crumpled up and stretched out on the deck. Carse's desire to sleep grew overpowering. Once more, as from a distance, he glimpsed Ku Sui's smile. He tried to back ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... 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 their stead wooded valleys and wide canons unfolded ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... is to be call'd, and to offset it, or finish it out, as if in Nature's and the great Muse's mockery of those poor mimes, came interpolated that scene, not really or exactly to be described at all, (for on the many hundreds who were there it seems to this hour to have left a passing blur, a dream, a blotch)—and yet partially to be described as I now proceed to give it. There is a scene in the play representing a modern parlor in which two unprecedented English ladies are inform'd by the impossible Yankee that he is not ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... of the journey through the traffic-laden streets to the hotel was so vivid a panorama of shifting scenes that, to the unaccustomed eyes of the girls, it seemed like one confused blur. ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... peaks have their separate personality. It is not a blur of nameless tips. Two especially arrest attention, south and southeast, for they rise head and shoulders above their neighbors. Each bears the name of the Pic du Midi. That opposite us, dominating the ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... some defect in her moral and affectional nature And as for any advance by a gentleman, young or old, that is not respectful or sincere, a young girl is much to blame if it ever happens more than once. Chaffing and teasing about beaux and courtship and marriage are very unbecoming, and blur that delicacy of feeling which is the greatest charm in the relation between young people of ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... without break or blur, continue my description; and to say truth, at this distance of time, I have some difficulty—so well acquainted was I with the actors and the scenery—in determining, without consulting my diary, what portions of the narrative I relate from hearsay, and what as a spectator. But that I am so far ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... great fire on shore, by which the defeated pirates lay carousing in the swamp. The other, a mere blur of light upon the darkness, indicated the position of the anchored ship. She had swung round to the ebb—her bow was now towards me—the only lights on board were in the cabin; and what I saw was merely a reflection ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he had played a little while, the composite pattern of faces always faded and darkened into a blur and he forgot them: forgot himself, forgot everything except the instrument that had become the mouthpiece of his soul. Then he, like his audience, was swept away into an impalpable world where nothing remained save the marvelous cascading and crushing tides ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... blur in the wavering shadows, darted to her side. His dagger sped through the cords that bound her, and he lifted her slight form down. For a moment ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... gave her credit for thoroughness, even while I wondered in a split second why I had not thought of this. Drugs could blur consciousness, at least, or suspend reality. The white nonhuman sprang forward and pinioned my arms with one strong, spring-steel forearm. With his other hand he forced my jaws open. I felt the furred fingers at the back of my throat, gagged, ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... bunting I had run up in the morning flapped fold against fold, heaving and tossing softly in the dark—against a sky so black with rain clouds that I could see above me only the blur of ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... faint, averted feet And many a tear, In our opposed paths to persevere. Go thou to East, I West. We will not say There's any hope, it is so far away. But, O, my Best, When the one darling of our widowhead, The nursling Grief, Is dead, And no dews blur our eyes To see the peach-bloom come in evening skies, Perchance we may, Where now this night is day, And even through faith of still averted feet, Making full circle of our banishment, Amazed meet; The bitter journey to the bourne so ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... dry-goods box full of children was a small, vague blur, a little darker than the darkness. The children slept the profound sleep of childhood and childhood's unbelonging toil. Sleep was smoothing Stefana's roughened little nerves with gentle hand and fortifying her courage for yet more strenuous toils ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... bloom of 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
... conscripti, putare] Here the relation of BF to {Pi} seems particularly close. {Pi}, like MVDoxa, has the abbreviation P.C. On a clearly written page, the error of reputare (BF) for P.C. PUTARE is not a specially likely one to make. But in the blur at the bottom of fol. 52v, a page on the flesh side of the parchment, the combination might readily be ...
— A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger • Elias Avery Lowe and Edward Kennard Rand
... lunacy. You can see him take up the block which he had just rejected, and make of it the corner-stone: a maddening way to deal with authorities; and the result so little like history that one almost blames oneself for wasting time. But the time is not wasted; the conspectus is always good, and the blur that remains on the mind is probably just enough. I have been enchanted with the unveiling of Revelations. And how picturesque that return of the false Nero! The Apostle John is rather discredited. And to think how one had ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that the moment had come, as the horse advanced and the enemy came within reach, the singing noose shot out, the wolf arose as if to spring, and the next instant Dog-toe whirled under spur and quirt, leaving only a blur behind as he shot across the corral. Only his rider had seen the noose fall true, the taut rope bespoke its own burden, and there was no time to shout. For an instant, Joel held his breath, only catching a swerve in the oncoming horse, whose rider bore down ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... a tumult in the summer skies, A blur of sunshine, and the rush of rain, The tempest dying in the twilight's hush, And I forget, forget the drift ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... a natural bohemian, and while he could conform to the conventionalities of society, he was never more pleased than when mixing with the variegated mass of mankind, where vice and virtue predominated without the guilt of hypocrisy to blur and blast the principles ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... 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, ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... detestation of horse racing; also an assertive Christianity. The daughter, Allison, had inherited the horse taint. The swinging gallop of a striving horse was to her the obliteration of everything but sunshine, and the smile of fields, and the blur of swift-gliding hedges, and the driving perfume of clover-laden winds that passed strong into spread nostrils. For Alan Porter, the son, there were columns of figures and musty-smelling bundles of tattered paper money where he clerked in the bank. There had been ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... 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
... stop at Simsbury for a young man who was presently commanding a meal in the palatial diner, and who had, before this meal was eaten, looked out with compassion upon two Simsbury-like hamlets that the train rushed by, a blur of small-towners standing on their depot platforms to envy the inmates of that ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... cattle had been driven off. A large herd was missing, and it must have taken a number of rustlers to have rounded them up and started them toward Double Z, or whatever place was to be used to change, or blur the brands, so the cattle could be sold to some innocent purchaser, perhaps. Though there were not wanting, in that ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... his eyes Wear the guise Of a purpose pure and wise, As the love of them is lifted to a something in the skies That is bright Red and white, With a blur of starry light, As it laughs in silken ripples to the ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley |
