"Blur" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... greater 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 ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... awkward and constrained attitudes, of course; and they all looked as if they had the instrument of torture which photographers call a head-rest under their occiputs. Here and there an elderly lady's face was a mere blur; and some of the younger children had twitched themselves into wavering shadows, and might have passed for spirit-photographs of their own little ghosts. It was the standard family-group photograph, in which most Americans have figured at some time or other; and Lapham exhibited a just ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... her through the blur of pain. "I wish you'd stay with me, Athalia, I've got a—a sort of—headache. Never mind about being a Shakeress just for to-night. It would be such a comfort to ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... when Wade tried to recall that mad ride, he found it only a vague blur upon his memory. He was conscious only of the fact that he had traveled at a speed which, in saner moments, he would have considered suicidal. Urging the big black over the rougher ground of the higher levels, he rode like a maniac, without regard for his own life and without mercy for the magnificent ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... front; of a pain at the base of her brain. 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. "Must get on," ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... she visited the 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 ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... 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 to glut ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... She felt inclined for a snooze, but was afraid it would not look well. While hesitating she ceased speaking, and both women fell asleep under the shade of their parasols. It was the shallow, glassy sleep of the open air, through which they divined easily the great blur ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... line in front of our own line here, one sees little but a gentle crest, protected by wire, in front of another gentle crest, also wired, with other gentle crests beyond and to the left. To the right there is a blur of gentle crests behind tree-tops. It is plain from a glance that gullies run irregularly into the spurs here, and make the defence easy. All through the fighting here, it happened too often that the taking of one crest only meant that ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... caught, as at Brightling, in 1659. Mr. Joseph Bennet, a minister in that town, wrote an account of the affair, published in Increase Mather's Remarkable Providences. 'Several things were thrown by an invisible hand,' including crabs! 'Yet there was a seeming blur cast, though not on the whole, yet upon some part of it, for their servant girl was at last found throwing some things.' She averred that an old woman had bidden her do so, saying that 'her master and dame were bewitched, and that they should hear ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... 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 "You murdered ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... this: leave ill alone! Who tries to mend his wife succeeds As he who knows not what he needs. He much affronts a worth as high As his, and that equality Of spirits in which abide the grace And joy of her subjected place; And does the still growth check and blur Of contraries, confusing her Who better knows what he desires Than he, and to that mark aspires With perfect zeal, and a deep wit Which nothing helps but trusting it. So, loyally o'erlooking all In which love's promise short may fall Of full performance, honour that As won, which aye love ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... vision, and there was a fleeting glimpse of sun-lit spires of mountains, shadowed valleys, and mysterious crevasses from which clouds of steam and yellow vapor curled. Still it seemed they must crash against one of those slender pinnacles. Nearer it came like a flash; a dizzying blur, now, that drove ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... 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
... 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
... were being driven rapidly, on a sharp trot as they turned, and then, a hundred feet further, at a slashing gallop. Just outside their trail appeared the marks of a galloping horse. A few rods farther along Keith came to a confused blur of pony tracks sweeping in from the east, and the whole story of the chase was revealed as though he had witnessed it with his own eyes. They must have been crazy, or else impelled by some grave necessity, to venture along this trail in so small a party. And they were travelling ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... of the dark blur behind his candle Alice perceived that he was no ordinary hunter. He was young, alert, and very good-looking, although his face was stern and his mouth bitter. He laid aside his hat as he approached the bunk in which the two women were cowering as mice tremble before a cat. For a full ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... immediately above the bench he had just quitted when he saw a blur of white—an indistinct patch in the half-light. He reached forward, and his trembling fingers closed upon a lady's handkerchief. And then—he caught the faintest breath of a perfume, strange yet hauntingly familiar, ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... of fire, or whatever it was, grew larger and larger. Col. Zane thought it might be a light carried by a man on horseback. But if this were true where was the clatter of the horse's hoofs? On that rocky blur no horse could run noiselessly. It could not be a horse. Fascinated and troubled by this new mystery which seemed to presage evil to them the watchers waited with that patience known only to those ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... good, Henderson," I said at last, abandoning the attempt in despair, and handing the telescope over to him. "I am almost certain that for a single instant I caught a faint blur of light away out there; but I cannot find it now. Take the glass, and see if you can meet with any better success. But verify your bearing before you ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... always, therefore, without Maggie, where, in fine, would he be? She united them, brought them together as with the click of a silver spring, and, on the spot, with the vision of it, his eyes filled, Charlotte facing him meanwhile with her expression made still stranger by the blur of his gratitude. Through it all, however, he smiled. "What my child does ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... contents have been drained, but fountains that still flow when the traveller who drank from them has passed on. Jarno, for example, a man of firm and definite outlines, and drawn here with masterly distinctness, without a blur or a wavering of the hand in the whole delineation, is yet the unexplained, unexhausted Jarno, when the book closes. He goes forward with the rest, known and yet unknown, a man of very definite limitations, and yet also of possibilities which the future ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... between his knees. It seemed to him that his thoughts were like a wheel, half-submerged in running water. The wheel went round rapidly, plunging in and out of his consciousness. Hardly had he grasped the meaning of one half when it went under and another blur of moving spokes emerged. Something his father had said, for instance, now began to pass through his mind.... "I've got my plans for her".... Dickie tried to stop the turning wheel because this speech ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... back, paddles athwart. Going with the stream, the voyageurs would "run"—"sauter les rapides"—the safest of the cataracts. Bowman, not steersman, was the pilot of such "runs." A faint, far swish as of night wind, little forward leaps and swirls of the current, the blur of trees on either bank, were signs to the bowman. He rose in his place. A thrust of the steel-shod pole at a rock in mid-stream—the rock raced past; a throb of the keel to the live waters below—the bowman crouches back, lightening the prow just as a rider "lifts" his horse ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... certain tongue of shingle thrust out from the further bank. For days and weeks these river marks had warned the anxious inquirers that they might not expect sport. The diminution of the tongue of land on the one side, and a blur in the pure white of the foam on the other, told the one-word ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... as blind. "I can see the people near me," he said, "but I can't make out their faces. I can just make out the pavement and the houses close at hand, and all the rest is a sort of white blur." He looked up: "That ceiling is a kind of white, ain't it? And this," tapping the wall and putting his nose close to it, "is a sort of green, ain't it?" The ceiling might have been whiter. The prevalent tints of the wall-paper had ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... Mathilde Wesendonck in his arms was Tristan in the arms of Isolde, he did not find a melody instead of a kiss on his lips; he did not find a progression of harmonies melting through the contours of a warm beauty with a blur of desperate ecstasies, semitones of desire, he found only the anxious happiness of any other lover. Nevertheless, he was gathering the substance of the second act of Tristan und Isolde. And it is ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... silent, or made little signs to one another as they watched the fire. Meanwhile the mother considered the papers, now with a gleam of anger in her eyes, as she read, and now with a momentary blur of tear-dimmed vision. Most of the letters she threw at once on the fire. They writhed a moment like living creatures, and of a sudden blazed out as if tormented into sudden confession of the passions of years gone by; then they ...
— Mr. Kris Kringle - A Christmas Tale • S. Weir Mitchell
... spared from the post, he ventured forth alone. When not more than ten miles from the post, he turned his head, as he topped a rock-ribbed ridge for a casual survey of the broad brule he had just crossed. The next instant he brought up rigidly erect as his eye caught a swift blur of motion far back on his trail at the opposite edge of the brule. He looked again but could make out only an army of blackened stumps. Entering the scrub with a vague sense of uneasiness, he circled among the stunted trees and took ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... first proofs, and, with them, 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 ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... the paternal standing, from the velvet coat of the mayor's son to the floury roundabout of the baker's offspring; I still heard all their different voices; I saw where each one sat in school; I recalled their words, their attitudes, their gestures. Gradually all the faces melted into a rosy blur, the jackets into a uniform neutral tint; the gestures were blent in a vague ripple of movement, and at last a thick mist enveloped ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various
... the table support my head. Mr. Rogers could see only the back and top of my head, no part of my face. At the first glance I caught the balance—it was a little less than two millions and a half. At once the other lines upon the sheet became a crimson blur. Into my mind rushed an avalanche of figures and facts which seemed to prove irresistibly that I should have read nine millions in place of the numbers that were burning themselves into my brain. But what if it were rightly but two and a half millions, and the ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... digest it. When, at the end of his life, social entertainments tried his nerves, he gave them up. When people came to see him, and he found himself getting tired or excited by conversation, if it was not convenient to him to leave the room, he put stoppers in his ears to blur the sense of the talk. What better parable of the elaborate framework of egotism on which his life was constructed could there be than the following legend, not derived from the book? One evening, the story goes, the philosopher had invited, at his club, a youthful stranger to join him in a game ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... narcotics? You play with jackstraws, 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... one were to wrest a living from the stones and sand of the hillside farm, one must be up and at work betimes. Then Harry, Tom, and Nellie must be roused, dressed, fed, and made ready for the half-mile walk to the red schoolhouse at the cross-roads. After that the day was one blur of steam, dust, heat, and stifling fumes from the oven and the fat-kettle, broken always at regular ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... only an indifferent glance, but, as he walked on, he was conscious that out of the blur of impressions the memory of ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... a faint blur on the surface of the mirror in Mr Carker's chamber, and its reflection was, perhaps, a false one. But it showed, that night, the image of a man, who saw, in his fancy, a crowd of people slumbering on the ground at his feet, like the poor Native at his master's door: who picked his way ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... into vogue. An artist undertook to take a view of the chateau with a group of guests on the balcony. His Lordship was, asked to keep perfectly still for five seconds, and he promised that he would not stir, but alas,—he moved. The consequence was that there was a blur where ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... the only friend I have to close my eyes is the man I plotted against and nearly despoiled of his lady-love," mutters Hollins. Either he is wandering a little bit or the brandy is potent enough to blur his sense of the nearness of death. "I wanted to tell you the truth—not that I look for forgiveness. I know your race well enough. You'll see fair play, but love and hate are things you don't change in ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... companion, during four dark days in December. It was a rude introduction. The wind blew in my face, with scuds of cold rain; a leaden mist hung low on the left, and rolled slowly up Channel. Now and then it thinned enough to reveal a white zigzag of breakers in front, and a blur of land; or, far below, a cluster of dripping rocks, with the sea crawling between and lifting their weed. But for the most part I saw only the furze-bushes beside the path, each powdered with fine raindrops, that in the aggregate resembled a coat of grey frieze, and the puffs of spray ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... scream man ever heard—it was a scream that got to a man. It sent cold shivers up an' down my back. The Red King had come into his own again—he was defyin' his master. He turned, then, an' the last I saw of him was a red blur in the distance. ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... over and saw the stone terrace dimly lit by the stars far below him. The gardens were a blur of darkness out of which he vaguely discerned the glimmer of ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... was 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
... that lurks in the corners of her mouth. Emma never tired of studying them—these girls with their firm, slim throats, their lovely faces, their Oriental eyes, and their conscious grace. Often, as she looked, an unaccountable mist of tears would blur her vision. ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... got some clothes on him, and took him ashore at Bourke to the new hospital. The doctors did all they knew, but Bogan was blind for life. He never saw anything again—except 'a sort of dull white blur,' as he called it—or his past life sometimes, I suppose. Perhaps he saw that for ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... all those years of loving thrift, Nor blame nor discord marred their lot; Each to the lover-life was gift; And each was free from blur or blot That called for silence ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... Joe suddenly, when the Major was a blur in a cloud of dust and the horsemen were specks in the distance, "this looks like home to me somehow. There ought to be great sheep feed over there in the foothills and summer range in the mountains. What do ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... melts away into everything else; there are no hard edges; it is only from a little distance that we see the effect as of individual features and existences. When we go close up, there is nothing but a blur and confused mass of apparently meaningless touches, as ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... possible? Why, Preston, why, Preston, my boy," said Mr. Garland, taking the young face gently between his hands, "when did things begin to blur so and look dim ...
— The Twin Cousins • Sophie May
... shakes The quiet clusters of the bees To powdery drift; He tosses them away, He drives them like spray; He makes them veer and shift Around his blustering path. In clouds blindly whirling, In rings madly swirling, Full of crazy wrath, So furious and fast they fly They blur the earth and blot the sky In wild, white mirk. They fill the air with frozen wings And tiny, angry, icy stings; They blind the eyes, and choke the breath, They dance a maddening dance of death Around their work, Sweeping the cover ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... glider," muttered Foulet and his tone was tinged with disappointment. But hardly had he spoken when, from one of the myriad roof-tops below us, rose a swift streak of shadow. So fast it flew, with such unbelievable speed, that to our eyes it was little more than a blur; but— ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... self-revelation, to be gleaned from familiar letters, as well as from his own history of his time. Yet, after all that has been brought together, Knox remains to many observers a mere hard outline, while to others he is almost an enigma—a blur, bright or black, upon the ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... desperate effort to know what was happening to the crippled 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 that the worst ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... is unto 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, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... round, packed closely, a glittering mass of shining horses and bright colours. One dropped at the jump near the judge's box, and as the other horses raced away round the turn the riderless horse followed, while his jockey lay still for a moment, a little scarlet blur upon the turf. Eager helpers ran forward to pick him up, but he was on his feet before they could reach him, and came limping up the hill, a little bruised ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... Dolph and Brittler were coming with a lantern; a blur of light brightened through ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... 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 hands the mild ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... and strained my eyes to see. All I could make out was a dim greyish mist, with something like a little spot or blur on it, at the place which the maid's finger indicated as the position occupied ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... was no longer there. He wished more than ever that he was back with Shining Fish. Then he remembered that in another week he would be on board the "Sea Gull." He watched Captain Stoddard's sloop until it was only a white blur against the distant shore, and then went ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis
... hardly lighted before they were startled by a confused sound of shouting from the compound;—a blur of shrill and deep voices, punctuated by the strained discordant bark of a dog;—a bark unmistakable to ears that have heard it once. Desmond sprang out of ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... back ever again?" The meadows swam in a blur before her eyes, and she thought of the purple velvet slippers which ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... 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 ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the couch, and she raised her head. In the half darkness he could not have seen how she was suffering. Her face was only a warm blur to him, vague and sweet and beautiful, with tender eyes. He said: "I think—I'm falling asleep. My head is so very, very queer! What is the matter with my head? Coira, do you think I might be kissed before I go ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... there was a long pause—a pause that was somehow akin to the flicker of the fire, the quiver of the reading-lamp upon their hands, the white blur from the window; a pause of shifting and ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... out at sea in the Channel, with fifty-four ships, when he sighted a dim blur toward the west. This was the Great Invincible Armada. Rain killed the wind, and the English lay under bare poles, unseen by the Spaniards, who still left some of their idle sails swinging to and fro. The great day had come at last. Philip's Armada had drunk to Der Tag (the day) of England's ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... block on 'em!" cried Bill with enthusiasm. Jim could just make out a dark blur in the fog ahead where the pursued hack was galloping to some unknown destination. At the sight all the fierce excitement of the chase came over Jim. He must not let that Mexican escape this time. It meant everything to get a hold of him. ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... they were to start with. Even the simplest stimuli of taste and of sound are different to the adult from what they are to the child. What for the adult is a printed page full of significance is for the baby a blur, or at most chaotic ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... Kentucky were spinning outside of the window in a vast green whirlpool. The distant trees and houses moved forward with the train, while the foreground, with its telegraph poles, its culverts, section-houses, and shrubbery, rushed backward in a blur. Now and then into the Jim Crow window whipped a blast of coal smoke and hot cinders, for the engine was ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... handsome young cub many things for which he should have been undyingly thankful. But when they reached the park—the cool, dim, moon-silvered park, its benches dotted with glimpses of white showing close beside a blur of black, Emma McChesney stopped talking. Not only did she stop talking, but she ceased to think of the boy seated beside her on ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... blur of flying trees and houses, bright in the late sunlight, Pottsville, with children wading and shouting, under the bridge, Hunt's Crossing, then the next ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... trust himself to speak again. The old sensation of choking had come back to him. The room was a blur. ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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 ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dawn, the two boys were called and came sleepily on deck. The day had broken cold and gray, while the wind had attained half a gale. Joe noted with astonishment the white tents of the quarantine station on Angel Island. San Francisco lay a smoky blur on the southern horizon, while the night, still lingering on the western edge of the world, slowly withdrew before their eyes. French Pete was just finishing a long reach into the Raccoon Straits, and at the same time studiously regarding a plunging sloop-yacht ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... made by 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 ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... 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
... seated between Miss Cash and the immensely interested Cousin Gussie, gazed dully about the circle. He saw little except a blur of faces; his thoughts were elsewhere, busy in dreadful anticipation of the scene he knew he must endure when he and his cousin and Miss Phipps returned to the house of the latter. He did not dare look in her direction, fearing to see once ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... 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 ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... doubt that he lived through in silence, with the strain of it showing in his pale face, and Charlie's voice echoing half heard in his ears. He drew back from Judith slightly as they stood. He was trembling. Judith's face was a blur of white before his eyes, then he could not see it—and then, as suddenly as it had come, ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... his eyes with a dazed expression, at first a blur of consciousness. Then gradually the recognition of himself, of his surroundings, of his life, came into them, and that self-knowledge was unmistakable. There was no doubt about the man with his twisted limbs and his twisted soul. He lay quite ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Fandor had a view that was fairy-like. Spread out in the distance were the sparkling lights of Paris. He was divided from them by the vast mass of roofs about him, by a gulf of empty space, and beyond, by a dark blur—the two arms of the Seine flowing on either side of the Palais de Justice.... The mysterious darkness! The fascination of the sparkling points of light!... Fandor gave himself a mental shake.... This was no moment for dreaming under ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... Ellen's mind became an incoherent blur. A stately limousine glided up; Mary Ellen was handed in by a footman and Excalibur was stuffed in after her in installments. The grand gentleman entered by the opposite door and sat down beside her; but Mary Ellen was much too dazed to ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... the calendar with which 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
... 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
... "Blur a' nouns, zur!" bawled the Irish hostler, as he came trotting up to the front veranda, where Triangle and Jingo were discussing the transportation ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... then at Thompson, and his face fell. Thompson, watching him as a man watches his antagonist, saw Tommy's lips tremble, a suspicious blur creep into his eyes. Even in his anger ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... him and through the blur of her tears she saw him smiling down at her, calmly, benignantly and with that little touch of whimsicality that was always in evidence and which even his heavy ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... now going to treat you with still greater frankness. I do not approve of your preface, and I will tell you why: if your work should deserve attention, it is a blur on the very face of it. Disadvantages of education, etc., ought, in my opinion, never to be pleaded with the public in excuse for defects of any importance, because if the writer has not sufficient strength of mind to overcome the common difficulties that ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Sorely sighing in bitterness of soul, I say, When shall my name be the quotation of the wise, and my countenance be the delight of the godly, like the illustrious lord of Laggan's many hills?[124] As for him, his works are perfect: never did the pen of calumny blur the fair page of his reputation, nor the bolt of ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... to its freshness, familiar and friendly as the voice of one's kin, and pushed the horses to a trot, while behind them the blur of light that was the city paled and died down as the miles multiplied under their hoofs. Peter had the leading rein of the middle horse while Barend steadied its burden, and thus they traveled towards the ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... and over the field went the 65th in a wild charge. The noise of a thousand seas was in the air, and the smoke of the bottomless pit. The yellow flashes of the guns came through it, and a blur of colour—the flag on the bank. On went their own great battle-flag, slanting forward as Billy Maydew ran. The bank flamed and roared. A bullet passed through the fleshy part of the boy's arm. He looked sideways at the blood. "Those durned bees ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... before us, we can make some headway. I believe the V-shape is the lower end of the mountain, probably a headland, and the arrow points to a place 30 leagues to the,—see here, in the last line is a W. and there is a blur before it and after it. That may be SWE, EWS, ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... 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 of soiling tears. "Dante, weep not, that Virgil leaves thee: nay, Weep thou not yet: behooves thee feel the edge Of other sword, and thou shalt weep for that." As to the prow or stern, some admiral Paces the deck, inspiriting his crew, When 'mid the sail-yards all hands ply aloof; Thus on ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... 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 read the thing so often, and never understood the attacks ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with a speed which made the flying rocks and foliage along the shore a blur—racing toward a white stretch of churning spray and foam that reached as far down the river as it was possible to see. From the water which dashed itself to whiteness against the rocks there still came the mighty boom! boom! which had put ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... 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 then upon the sentry. The wandering rays caused the eyes to glitter ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... 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, ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... surprisingly, the light wavered out, leaving the schooner in stony blackness. A vague blur of complementary color swam in Madden's eyes. A gasp went up ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... towers of a city given over to the devourer. She had no wish to meet him again. Without telling herself why, she would have shunned the meeting. Disturbers that thwarted her simple happiness in sublime scenery were best avoided. She thought so the more for a fitful blur to the simplicity of her sensations, and a task she sometimes had in restoring and toning them, after that sweet morning time ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... dark when he returned to his window, but the far shore was only an indistinct blur of gloom. The fires were brighter. One of them, built solely because of the rivermen's inherent love of light and cheer, threw the blaze of its flaming logs twenty feet ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... 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 ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... and rejecting, one after another, the desperate expedients that suggested themselves. Suddenly looking up he perceived among the trees, at the distance of a few paces, Rina standing. Hot anger instantly welled up in his breast, and made a red blur before his eyes. Rina's sex was no protection to her then. ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... you to come down to his place in a hurry.'—'An' who the devil is your masther?' says I; 'an' didn't think ye had one, only yourself, an' you so fine.'—'Oh,' says he, 'my masther is the Prence Ragin.'—'Blur an' ouns,' says I; 'tell his honour I'll be wid him in the twinklin' ov a bedpost, the minit I take my face from behind my beard, an' get on my clane flax; but stop a bit,' says I; 'where does the masther live?'—'Down at Carltown Palace,' says he; 'so make ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... ascent, dragging himself up by the tops of the slender saplings, stopping every few yards to half- stretch himself out in the soft mass through which he was struggling, panting with exhaustion. He shouted when he gained the top of the ridge. Up through the white blur of snow on the other side there came to him faintly a shout; yet, in spite of its faintness, Jan knew that it was ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... am, my dear kind friend," the girl answered with emotion; "and I can see! see to read fine print that is all a blur to me without these glasses; and all the pain is gone, the fear, the distress of body and mind. Oh, the Lord has been good, good to me! and the doctor so kind and interested! I shall be grateful to him and to you as ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... this distance of time, could not fail to excite an interest in visitors. The few lines of writing, commencing with the stirring words: 'Courage, mes compatriotes!' ended with only a part of the subscription. The letters, Robes, were all that were appended, and were followed by a blur of the pen; while the lower part of the paper shewed certain discolorations, as if made by drops of blood. And so this was the last surviving token of the notorious Robespierre! It is somewhat curious, that no historian seems to be aware ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 426 - Volume 17, New Series, February 28, 1852 • Various
... Lou, standing at the bar. In that second, she seemed to realize for the first time that something was wrong. She pushed herself violently away from the bar, and looked frantically around, her mouth opening to call. Petkoff was a blur next to her; Malone didn't look at him clearly. Lou took ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... prayed, what I saw before my eyes was a most outrageous picture which adorned a song-book used in Sunday School, portraying the Lord upon his throne, surrounded by tiers and tiers of saints and angels all in a blur of yellow. I am ashamed to tell how old I was when that picture ceased to appear before my eyes, especially when moments of terror compelled me to ask protection ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... tears of human passion, Blur not the image true; This was not folly's fashion, This was ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... my staggering consciousness could realize was an immensity, an immeasurable uprearing that brought with it the same throat-gripping vertigo as comes from gazing downward from some great height—then a blur of white faces—intolerable shinings of hundreds upon thousands of eyes. Huge, incredibly huge, a colossal amphitheatre of jet, a stupendous semi-circle, held within its mighty arc the ivory platform ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... de feast? me spurne a, me kick a de feast; be garr, me tell a me do de grand grace, de favor for suppa, for dina, for eata with dee; be garrs blur, we have at home de restorative, de quintessence, de pure destill goulde, de Nector, de Ambrosia. Zacharee, make ready de fine ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... and obeying some strange impulse, the girlish figure turned and made straight for the wildly yelling men, who stood in the form of a great circle in the center of which two men weaved and milled about each other in a blur of motion. ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx |
