"Blurred" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wife of a nomad Kenite. Such are the contents of the song in chap. v. In the preceding narrative (chap. iv.) we should expect to find a historical commentary on the song, but we find a mere reproduction in which the special features of the story are blurred and falsified. Instead of the kings of Canaan we have the king of Canaan, as if Canaan had been a kingdom. Sisera, the head of the Canaanite kings, is transformed into a mere general; the oppression of the Hebrews is made ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... Dillingham Young." The "Dillingham" had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, the letters of "Dillingham" looked blurred, as though they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called "Jim" and greatly hugged by Mrs. ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... Perhaps, if their books were taken from them even then, they might forget what they had learned. But no, the evil was done; the brain had received certain impressions that could not be blurred over. ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... colorless professor with a music book in his hand. He placed it on the piano-desk and mumbled: "Very indifferent. Read this at sight." Puzzled by the miserable light, the still more wretched typography, I peered at the notes as peers a miser at the gold he is soon to lose. No avail. My vision was blurred, my fingers leaden. Suddenly I noticed that, whether through malicious intent or stupid carelessness, the book was upside down. Now, I knew my Bach fugues, if I may say it, backward. Something familiar ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... poignant experiences or, perhaps, because of them, the memory of the first years at Hull-House is more or less blurred with fatigue, for we could of course become accustomed only gradually to the unending activity and to the confusion of a house constantly filling and refilling with groups of people. The little children who came to the kindergarten in the morning were followed by the afternoon ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... toward the Del Oro. After hours of travel she came to the saddle from which one looked down to the gap in the canyon walls that had been the common watering place of all men's cattle, but now was homesteaded by her father. Far below her it lay, a dwarfed picture with detail blurred to a vague impressionistic map. She could see the hut, the fence line running parallel to the stream on the other side, some grazing cattle, Sweeney's horse ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... step under the shadow of a wall. She was poorly dressed, her age was between forty and fifty; her head was bound with a red-checked handkerchief, from which fell meshes of coarse, uncombed hair. Her face was red, her eyes blurred, and she moved with her eyes bent down to the ground. Her right hand was in her pocket; in the other she held one of the high, narrow tin cans in which milk is carried in Paris, but which now contained petroleum. The street seemed deserted. She stopped and ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... a definition of it, was that it was less big, but more definitely poignant. Beyond that he did not, or could not, go. For some five minutes or so he leant at the little casement window, gazing at the gold of the buttercups seen through a blurred mist of rain. Then he pulled the window to, and came ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... were the swing-boats and merry-go-rounds, Yellow varnish that wavered, machines making sounds, Rifles cracking like cork-pops, fifes whining with steam, "All hot," from a pieman; all blurred as in dream. ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... and at last in the famous jog trot of the scout he went. The sky was blackened with clouds at length, and the jealous, howling east wind rolled up in rain; the spindrift blurred the way; the heavy showers of spring came down and drenched him; but his pack was safe and he trotted on and on. Then long, deep swamps of alder barred his path, and, guided only by the compass, Rolf pushed in and through and ever east. Barely a mile an hour in the thickest ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Navigator on our escape, and I had just told the gun's crew to cease firing at the blurred outlines on the port quarter from which the random shells still came, when there was a sheet of yellow flame and a jar which threw me against the signalman. The latter had been standing near the conning-tower hatch, and unfortunately I knocked him off his balance, ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... of mental illusion, he had heard a moccasin brush a dry leaf far away. The command of Tayoga, though spoken in jest, had been so impressive that his ear was obeying it. Firm in the belief that his own dark shadow blurred with the dark trunk, and that he was safe from the sight of a questing eye, he lay there a ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... unconsidered word that he would snap up with delight. It was that peculiarity that somehow put me on my guard. I had no idea who I was facing across the table and as a matter of fact I did not care. All my impressions were blurred; and even the promptings of my instinct were the haziest thing imaginable. Now and then I had acute hallucinations of a woman with an arrow of gold in her hair. This caused alternate moments of exaltation and depression from which I tried to take refuge in conversation; ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... evening—(my pain seemed gone for a moment, yet I was hobbling slowly)—I say as I was considering this complex doctrine, I felt my sack suddenly much lighter, and I had hardly time to rejoice at the miracle when I heard immediately a very loud crash, and turning half round I saw on the blurred white of the twilit road my quart of Open Wine all broken to atoms. My disappointment was so great that I sat down on a milestone to consider the accident and to see if a little thought would not lighten my acute annoyance. Consider that I ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... in another minute land came abruptly out of the fog. Two blurred forms resolved themselves into men as Perry beached the dingey and tiredly dropped the oars. The men came toward him and proved, on nearer acquaintance, to be middle-aged and apparently natives. "Quite a fog," drawled one of them. "What boat you ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... lopsidedly, the left side of his face refusing to make the effort. "Arright," he said, in a low, blurred voice. "Wha' happen', Frang?" ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Casey, breathing deep when, stomach full and resentment toward the past blurred by satisfaction with his present, he filled his pipe and fingered his vest pocket for a match. "Gas stoves can't cook nothin' so there's any taste to it. That there's the first real meal I've et in six months. Light a match and turn on the gas and call that a fire! Hunh! Good ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... wondering, I turned the musty leaves, For Love's book counts out centuries as years, And here and there a page shone out undimmed, And here and there a page was blurred with tears. ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... possessed over the remoter parts of the island. The shire organisation, set up in an earlier generation, became little more than nominal. The constitutional movement of the thirteenth century extended to the island, and the Irish parliament, then growing up out of the old council, reflected in a blurred fashion the organisation of the English parliament of the three estates. But royal lieutenants and councils, shires and sheriffs, parliaments and justices had only the most superficial influence on Irish life. Real authority was divided between ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... rolled lazily in the trough of the swell as she sped down the coast. Suddenly the darkness ahead was blurred by an indistinct shape and the man at the wheel put the vessel over sharply. As he did so he narrowly escaped a collision with an unlighted boat which ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... the hill fell away so abruptly that the roofs of the nearest houses were almost at their feet; and beyond these the city tumbled raggedly down to meet the bay in a confused, vague mass of roofs, cornices, cupolas, and chimneys, blurred and indistinct in the twilight, but here and there pierced by a new-lighted street lamp. Then came the bay. To the east they could see Goat Island, and the fleet of sailing-ships anchored off the water-front; while directly in their line of ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... contains many beautiful things, but by omitting the necessary steps in argument, and by speaking of one thing allusively in terms of another, and by a profound desultoriness of thought, the poet produces a blurred and tangled impression. The beauties of Sordello would not lose by being ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sky behind and blue shadows before, they looked like one of Hedger's own paintings of that period; two figures, one white and one dark, and nothing whatever distinguishable about them but that they were male and female. The faces were lost, the contours blurred in shadow, but the figures were a man and a woman, and that was their whole concern and their mysterious beauty,—it was the rhythm in which they moved, at last, along the roof and down into the dark hole; he first, drawing her ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... recollect, were gray, and black, and brown, and blue, And, when he was not bald, his hair was of chameleon hue; Lean, fat, tall, short, rich, poor, grave, gay, a blonde and a brunette— Aha, amid this London fog, John Smith, I see you yet; I see you yet, and yet the sight is all so blurred I seem To see you in composite, or as in a waking dream, Which are you, John? I'd like to know, that I might weave a rhyme Appropriate to your character, your politics and clime; So tell me, were you "raised" or "reared"—your pedigree confess In some such treacherous ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... night's sleep the adventure by the shore had grown perhaps a little blurred in some of its details. I wished I could see that curved thing rising against the night sky a trifle more distinctly in my mind's eye; so that I could take my oath in court it was a weapon. Still, I remained perfectly assured I had been attacked, and the sustaining ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... scene rose a blurred hum of sound; rose and as it were remained stationary above it—like a smoke-cloud, which no wind comes to drive away. Gradually, though, the ear made out, in the conglomerate of noise, a host of separate noises infinitely multiplied: ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... in character. Elsie seemed to have a brooding protective care over the little unkempt Jean, exercising a sort of guardianship of her in the new life at school. She would often come to her rescue when Jean sat pouting over a blurred slate, en which she was helplessly trying to reproduce the figures on the blackboard, or give her timely aid amid the involvements of some question in the Shorter Catechism. It was Elsie who tied the bonnet-strings ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... away in pursuit of his last companion with a winged gallop. It seemed that the wind caught him up and buoyed him from stride to stride, and the cowpunchers with hungry, burning eyes watched without a word until the grey and the chestnut blurred on the horizon and dipped out of view together. The spell was broken in the same instant by a stream of profanity floating up from the rear. It was Lew Hervey ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... forth, with a sturdy rider on his back; his clear neigh rang through the thick dull streets, and kind people came to their white blurred windows, and exclaimed, as they glanced at the party-colored horseman rushing away into the dreary depths, "Well, rather ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... of the houses where she was a governess, express precisely the same feeling, and movement of mind. But notice the instinctive rightness and swiftness of Emily's, the blurred ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... novelist loses more than George Sand,—who has so much to lose! The qualities sacrificed, though almost intangible, are essential to the force of her charm. The cement is taken away and the fabric coheres imperfectly; and whilst the beauties of her manner are blurred, its blemishes appear increased; the lengthiness, over-emphasis of expression, questionable taste of certain passages, become more marked. Although nevertheless many of her tales remain pleasant reading, they suffer as much as translated poetry, and ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... Saxon's brain snapped with a white flash of light, while her whole body relaxed, numb and weak, volitionless, sad her vision reeled and blurred. The next instant she was herself again, in ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... the book, started reading again ... strangely a rush of tears flooded my eyes and blurred the type.... ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... adieu, and went out without turning her head—perhaps because her brown eyes had suddenly blurred with tears. ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... lay scattered in flocculent masses over Ireland and the west of England. For now I could see the outlines of the north of France and Ireland, and all this Island of Britain, save where Scotland passed over the horizon to the north, or where the coast was blurred or obliterated by cloud. The sea was a dull grey, and darker than the land; and the whole panorama was rotating ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... His hands were nearly normal and his vision wasn't blurred. He looked at the little animal curled in his lap, gazing up at him with solemn yellow eyes. If he gave it encouragement it would probably be crawling all over him. However, he couldn't have it frisking around while he was flying. "Come, Pet," he said—there wasn't anything ...
— Bolden's Pets • F. L. Wallace
... yesterday you marvelled at their stablishment; this morning they will be floating above the world. One week the clear-cut beauty of their lines and curves gladdens your heart; the next, a mocking mystery of soft blurred battlements will tease your vision. Such shifting sorcery is never stale. Light, shade, and atmosphere play such fantastic tricks with Pau's fair heritage that the grey town, curled comfortably in the sunshine upon her plateau's edge, ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... words, perhaps that they might not impede each other in their flow, which lent a disconcerting curtness of enunciation to an amazing rapidity of the same. Indeed, Miss Carmichael talked so fast that Emily got but a blurred impression of her surroundings, carrying away a dazed consciousness that the contents of certain jars to the right and left of the lady were amphibian in their nature, and that certain other objects in skin leering down from dusty shelves were there because ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... dropped on the Brooks, and once more blurred the moon and stars, and shut the sunlight out; and starred a thousand jewels on the mill-dam's brow; and sparkled a myriad icicles from the rumbling wheels. Far away into the country it spread a white mantle, and froze into the very heart of all the Ponds and Creeks above. And then the sun came ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... thoughts refuse to go beyond it. Suppose the very sight of so much sickness has agitated you instead of strengthening your determination to help nurse it. That is, suppose your emotions, your feelings, so fill your mind that perception is necessarily inaccurate and blurred. Then tomorrow your account of the ward will be hazy, and your desire will probably be against returning to a place where so many unpleasant feelings ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... has no distinctive features. It is land without form. It stretches away without cape or bluff, long and low—indefinitely; and when the heavy gusts of the northeast monsoon drive the thick rain slanting over the sea, it is seen faintly under the grey sky, black and with a blurred outline like the straight edge of a dissolving shore. In the long season of unclouded days, it presents to view only a narrow band of earth that appears crushed flat upon the vast level of waters by the weight of the sky, whose ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... sprang from stone to stone with the surefootedness of a mountain goat, we soon reached the cluster of rocks, the bases of which were embedded in the now hard and stiffened sand, and almost at the same moment another heavy rain squall swept down and blurred sea and sky ...
— Susani - 1901 • Louis Becke
... She shook back the soft curls with a little sigh. "It's queer and old, and funny—some of the words. And the writing is blurred and yellow. Look." She held up the ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... it would become indistinct. How gentle he was, and how different from Henry! "Nancy!" he repeated. Then the root became altogether blurred and meaningless, and she felt him take her in his arms and kiss her. "Darling Nancy," he was saying; and, somehow, to her great relief, she found an ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... hide the distortion of pain in her features; still she just saw the splendid chariot, the gold harness on the horses, and the figure of the insolent owner glide past her, as if in a dream that was blurred by pain, and the sight infused into her soul, that was already harassed by pain and anxiety, a feeling of bitter aversion, and the envious thought that the mere trappings of the horses of this extravagant prodigal would suffice to keep her and her family above misery ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and again! I never felt him at all. Suddenly my line rose—and then, bewilderingly near the boat, when I was looking far off, the water split with a roar and out shot a huge, gleaming, white-and-purple fish. He blurred in my sight. Down he went with a crash. I wound the reel like a madman, but I never even half got up the slack line. The swordfish had run straight toward the boat. He leaped again, in a place I did not expect, and going down, instantly ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... the machine twisted and snarled like an angry beast and came to a stand almost into the arms of a barricade across the road. The young man hurled out an oath, and leaned forward to look, his eyes almost too blood-shot and blurred ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... strike a position where the principal image to be photographed will appear sharp and clear. The camera is then in focus, but we shall discover that other objects more in the background or foreground will appear blurred and confused. Often it is desirable to have a blurred or "fuzzy" background, but if we desire to bring the indistinct objects in focus we must "stop down" our lens first by trying the No. 8 stop, and if this does ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... vessel, of Dr. Hunter and his instruments, and of his daughter, Helen, who acted as his secretary. She looked not at all like a scientist, Dan recalled. In fact, her face had seemed rather pretty, even in the blurred newspaper half-tone. ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... brother's possession. This argument, however, did not count for much, as he had ample time before his arrest to burn it or to destroy it. As to the only positive evidence in the case—the muddy footmarks upon the floor—they were so blurred by the softness of the carpet that it was impossible to make any trustworthy deduction from them. The most that could be said was that their appearance was not inconsistent with the theory that they were made by the accused, and ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sight of women and the sound of their voices. It is true that they saw women often, and many of them—some who were beautiful and some who were not—as they sped through the West, but it was always a flitting and blurred glimpse. "I haven't got an impression of the features of a single one of them," complained the elderly beau, Tremaine. Now two women whom they knew well and liked would be with them for days, and they ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... word was spoken, not a thought Was thought, of what the look meant with the word "Home" as we walked and watched the sunset blurred. And then to me the word, only the word, "Homesick," as it were ...
— Poems • Edward Thomas
... never been able to translate from hearing anyhow. This morning when Miss Sawyer took her seat on the platform and opened her book, Ethelwynne bent forward anxiously, every nerve alert and strained. What was the first word? Oh, what was it? She had not caught it. It sounded blurred and mazy with no ending at all. And the next—and the next! And the third! Now she had lost it. The first was gone. She had forgotten the second. The voice went reading on and on. She floundered after, falling farther and farther behind. There wasn't any sense to it, and she ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... windy noon in the beginning of autumn. The sky and the sea were almost of the same color, and that not a beautiful one. The edge of the horizon where they met was an edge no more, but a bar thick and blurred, across which from the unseen came troops of waves that broke into white crests, the flying manes of speed, as they rushed at, rather than ran towards the shore: in their eagerness came out once more the old enmity ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... but that she was English; even as I watched, up to her mizzen-peak fluttered the English flag. And hereupon a great yearning came upon me, insomuch that of a sudden her high, weatherbeaten sides, her towering masts and patched canvas grew all blurred and indistinct. ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... than thirty years of age. Liquor was never meant to be a steady companion. It was the animating influence which made oats wild. Work and responsibility are the portion of the mature man. Rum was designed for youthful days when the reckless avidity for experience is so great that reality must be blurred a little ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... the dark oaken staircase with its black balustrade, and approached the old man's chamber, the door of which they found open, and in the blurred looking-glass which hung deep within the room Redclyffe was surprised to perceive the young face of a woman, who seemed to be arranging her head-gear, as women are always doing. It was but a moment, and then it vanished like ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the blind, and saw with a dull acquiescence that the brightness of the May had fled. The wind was high—he heard it fly past, moaning. In the watery sky, the round sun loomed silver-pale and blurred. To his fevered eye it ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... gazing down into the valley, as one looks at a landscape who has not yet mastered all its changes of expression; its details were blurred in the hot, dusty glare; the mountains opposite had faded to a flat outline against the indomitable sky. A light wind blew up the slope, flickering the pale leaves of a manzanita, whose burnished, cinnamon-colored stems glowed in the sun. As the breeze ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... alien word, Which Mildred faintly understood; Its poisoned breathing had not blurred The whiteness of her womanhood, Nor had its ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... late and refined, rare as a note and immortal as a link, set in motion by the miraculous infusion of a modern impulse and yet, for all the sudden freedom of folds and footsteps forsaken after centuries by their pedestal, keeping still the quality, the perfect felicity, of the statue; the blurred, absent eyes, the smoothed, elegant, nameless head, the impersonal flit of a creature lost in an alien age and passing as an image in worn relief round and round a precious vase. She had always had odd moments of striking him, daughter ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... the general blankness, with his high boots and oilskins, smoking a short clay pipe by the door of the engine-room; and further out, under the dripping dome of an umbrella, sat Oswyn in a great pea-jacket, smoking, painting the mist, the rain, the white river with its few blurred barges and its background of dreary warehouses, in a supreme disregard of the dank discomfort of ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... like music heard across the water in the evening, blurred into strange harmonies, his old watchwords echo a little in his mind. Like the red flame of the sunset setting fire to opal sea and sky, the old exaltation, the old flame that would consume to ashes all the lies in the world, the trumpet-blast under which the walls of Jericho would fall ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... the savage fails to recognise those limitations to his power over nature which seem so obvious to us. In a society where every man is supposed to be endowed more or less with powers which we should call supernatural, it is plain that the distinction between gods and men is somewhat blurred, or rather has scarcely emerged. The conception of gods as superhuman beings endowed with powers to which man possesses nothing comparable in degree and hardly even in kind, has been slowly evolved in the course of history. By primitive peoples ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... this character. He is nature's fresh picture newly drawn in oil, which time, and much handling, dims and defaces. His soul is yet a white paper[3] unscribbled with observations of the world, wherewith, at length, it becomes a blurred note-book. He is purely happy, because he knows no evil, nor hath made means by sin to be acquainted with misery. He arrives not at the mischief of being wise, nor endures evils to come, by foreseeing them. He kisses and loves all, and, when the smart of the rod is past, smiles ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... brutally; and she stood, white and gasping, staring at him with large, frightened eyes. The sheep-walk was but a tiny threadlike track: the slope of the shingle on either side was very steep: below them lay the valley; distant, lifeless, all blurred by the evening dusk. She looked about her helplessly for ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... necessity only which makes courtiers of so many of us: some are born to the vocation, and Gower strikes one as naturally more prudent and cautious—in short, more of a politic personage—than Chaucer. He survived him eight years—a blind invalid, in whose mind at least we may hope nothing dimmed or blurred the recollection of a friend to whom he owes much of ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... often are) with an exceedingly distrustful and corrective thumb, that busy member had so often interposed to smear his notes, that they were little more legible than the various impressions of itself; which blurred his nose and forehead. It is curious to consider, in such a case as Mr Boffin's, what a cheap article ink is, and how far it may be made to go. As a grain of musk will scent a drawer for many years, and still lose nothing appreciable of its original weight, so a halfpenny-worth of ink ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... to the window, raised it, and let in the uproar of the streets below. He looked down at the blurred, hurrying swarms and he looked across, over the roofs with their panting jets of vapor, into the vast, foggy heart of the smoke. Dizzy traceries of steel were rising dimly against it, chattering with steel on steel, and screeching in steam, while tiny figures of men walked on threads in ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... on the road looking down at her. He did not offer to approach her, neither did he make any other movement or gesture. Flora de Barral told me all this. She could see him through her tears, blurred to a mere shadow on the white road, and then again becoming more distinct, but always absolutely still and as if lost in thought before a strange phenomenon which ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... in his overcoat pockets, he went through the gateway, and chose a path at random. To the idlers on the garden benches who took note of him as he passed, he gave the impression of one struggling with nausea. To his own blurred consciousness, he could not say which stirred most vehemently within him, his loathing for the creature he had fed and ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... it pierce the heart, Works into it some glorious design; Which on this under side of life is blurred, Thread over thread in infinite confusion. Or, if we are not made of firmest texture, The work pulls through, or tears an ugly rent, Or gathers up our woof in meshy tangles. This is a world of worn and fretted ends, Knit in a maze of fearful intricacy, ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... The book is pervaded with the spirit of a dreamy pathos, such as constitutes the mental atmosphere of modern Rome; not unlike the haze of an Indian summer day, which we only half enjoy from a foreboding of the approach of winter. All outlines are softened and partially blurred in it, as time and decay have softened the outlines of the old Roman ruins. We recognize the same style with which we are familiar in "The Scarlet Letter," but influenced by a change in ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... towards her she felt the mingled kindness and irritation that he always roused in her. He stood in the light of the hall lamp, a fat man, a soft hat pushed to the back of his head, a bag in one hand. His face was weak and good-tempered, his eyes had once been fine but now they were dim and blurred; there were dimples in his fat cheeks; he wore on his upper lip a ragged and untidy moustache and he had two indeterminate chins. His expression was mild, kindly, now a little ashamed, now greatly indignant. ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... be," Ross muttered, and then blurred into sudden action. He shot to his feet, and then, arms extended, dashed toward the source of the voice. He hit the ...
— The Common Man • Guy McCord (AKA Dallas McCord Reynolds)
... a waltz tune. The pale girls, the old widow lady, the three Jews lodging in the same boarding-house, the dandy, the major, the horse- dealer, and the gentleman of independent means, all wore the same blurred, drugged expression, and through the chinks in the planks at their feet they could see the green summer waves, peacefully, amiably, swaying round the iron pillars ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... the only one whose condition had been aggravated; others also were suffering from the journey. Resting in the lap of her despairing mother, who gazed at her with large, tear-blurred eyes, little Rose had ceased to stir, and had grown so pale that Madame Maze had twice leant forward to feel her hands, fearful lest she should find them cold. At each moment also Madame Sabathier had to move her husband's legs, for their weight was so great, said ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... streets were filled with horses, men, and mules. The saloons were jammed to suffocation. Musical discord filled the air. Only the land, the silent old hills, the ancient, burned-out furnace of gold, was absolutely calm. Overhead a few clouds blurred the sky. Beyond them the eternal march of the stars proceeded in the majesty of space, with billions of years in which to fulfil the cosmic ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... agent continued to stare into the sky. Shortly something arrived in the field of vision; a blurred speck, far to one side. It approached leisurely, with the unknown agent watching steadfastly. It still remained blurred, however; for a long time the engineer knew as little about its actual form as he knew about ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... dreamed and dreamed of walking the streets at night, through the driving snow of winter and down to the wharves and the river, with its cakes of ice and its welcome. And when the first day I had gone to sit in the intelligence room and a lady—she seemed like a blurred picture to me and her questions were far away like the rumble of a train at night—had hired me, I took my alligator bag that was left out of the wreck of old elegance, and I stood up and tried to follow her like a dog till she ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... York; and a "Holland Interior" by Dr. Gessler, Philadelphia. Of her recent exhibition a critic writes: "The pictures are notable for their careful attention to detail of drawing. Architectural features of the rich old Gothic churches are faithfully indicated instead of blurred, and the treatment is almost devotional in tone, so sympathetic is the quality of the work. There is a total absence of the garish coloring which has become so common, the religious subjects being without exception in a minor key, usually soft grays and blues. It is indeed in composition and ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... beginning to break, this forest of the church under whose shade he was sitting became absolutely unintelligible. The shapes, faintly sketched, were transformed in the gloom which blurred every outline as it slowly faded. Below, in the vanishing mist, rose the immemorial trunks of fabulous white trees, planted as it seemed in wells that held them tightly in the rigid circle of their margin; and the night, now almost diaphanous on the level of the ground, was thicker ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... aware that Glenkindie was ever a beautiful object, being short, and gross-bodied, and with an expression of sensuality comparable to a bear's. At that moment, coming in hissing from many potations, with a flushed countenance and blurred eyes, he was strikingly contrasted with the tall, pale, kingly figure of Glenalmond. A rush of confused thought came over Archie - of shame that this was one of his father's elect friends; of pride, that at the least of it Hermiston could carry his liquor; and last of all, of rage, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Ruan turned his head a little on the pillow, so that he could watch the changing square of sky. A ragged curtain of cloud, blurred and wet-looking at the edge, hung almost to the hill-top, but between ran a streak of molten pallor, and against it the hedge of wilted thorns that crowned the hill stood out black and contorted. One great ploughed field stretched from the garden ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... open the swinging door of the saloon and made his way amid the crowd of men within, through an atmosphere blurred with tobacco smoke and heavy with the smell of spirits. The place was brilliantly lighted, and the huge, heavily gilt mirrors upon every wall reflected and multiplied the garish illumination. There were several bartenders in their ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... do come to me, it shall be for ever!" There was something in the intonation of the last sentence—I felt its sincerity myself—some implied yearning for a promise, that made her beautiful eyes swim. The glorious stars in them were blurred as she answered with a fervour which seemed to ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... Kohn's little lamp the upper torso of Kuno Kohn was a bit bent over the table. On the sofa, breaking the circle of lamplight and stretching beyond it, lay Max Mechenmal, half in the dark. Windows glittered in lush, flowing black. Swollen and blurred objects rose up out of the darkness. The open bed shone with a whiteness. Kohn's hands held papers with writing on them. His voice sounded gentle, dreamy, singing with feeling. He often became hoarse, and coughed like someone who had read much. One could hear: "The old, splendid stories about God ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... in any way blurred or tarnished can be restored by polishing it with a soft piece of newspaper. First rub well with a piece slightly moistened and afterward repeat the process with dry paper. Rubbing with a soft brush dipped in fine, soft whiting is another method often employed for ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... Since I arrived not a leaf has stirred, not a bird has sung, the tides ebb and flow in listless and soundless ripples. Far off, on the shallow sea, phantom ships hover and are gone, and on an indefinite horizon a blurred ocean blends with a blurred sky. On Mount Ophir heavy cloud-masses lie always motionless. The still, heavy, fragrant nights pass with no other sounds than the aggressive hum of mosquitoes and the challenge of the sentries. But through the stormy days and the heavy ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... was evening, all Day's banners stream in crimson rout Till night's soft finger blurred them out, And, high and far, A perfect star Shone where the ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... rest in the dull yellow glow of the field lights. A new world here. The field was flat, caked ooze, cracked and hardened. It sloped upward from the shore toward where, a quarter of a mile away, I could see the dull lights of the settlement, blurred by ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... of dry wood cut into short lengths. In an instant the awful meaning of these preparations flashed across his mind. They intended to boil him alive! For a moment he felt sick and dizzy. All things spun in a mad whirl before his blurred vision, and he feared his senses were departing. Recovering himself by a supreme effort of will, and animated by an access of fury, he sprang forward, overturned the tub, so that its contents were poured on the hissing flames, instantly extinguishing them, and hurled ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... colonel was getting ready to retire a servant brought him a note. It was damp, as though it had been splashed with water, and when the detective had read it and had noted Viola's signature, he knew that her tears had blurred the writing. ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... Curiously accurate! A dim glimmer had come into the eye, but there is not yet distinctness of outline nor sense of magnitude, which must be acquired by practice. The eye has not yet been educated, and it was only because these blurred figures were in motion that he knew they were not trees. 'After that He put His hands upon his eyes and made him look up,' or, as the Revised Version has it with a better reading, 'and he looked steadfastly,' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... A blurred sun rises in the sky.... One can see the green valley of Rion and the Bay of Poti by ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... afford the extravagance of midnight revelry, and there are few street-lamps alight after ten o'clock in any London suburb in these times of martial law. Walthamstow slept in heated but profound oblivion of its mean existence. Beyond the town lay, like a prostrate giant camel, the heat-blurred silhouette of the classic forest. Low over Walthamstow hung the festoons of flat, humid clouds, menacing storm, ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... latitude as that at which they had at first approached the Moon, and it was here that they began most unquestionably to leave her. They looked and looked, readjusting their glasses, but the details were becoming more and more difficult to catch. The reliefs grew more and more blurred and the outlines dimmer and dimmer. Even the great mountain profiles began to fade away, the dazzling colors to grow duller, the jet black shadows greyer, and the ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... had been written with an indelible pencil. The dampness had only blurred the writing instead of erasing it. Her attention thus engaged, she idly scrutinized more than the blurred lines. Her attitude as she sat there on the boulder slowly stiffened; her gaze ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... a renowned professor at Oxford, celebrated for his attainments in theology and in physical science. But the peace-loving man of letters died ere his boys had grown to youth, and, alas, the memory of him is blurred and indistinct in their minds. They remember a quiet, soft-voiced, tender-hearted man who was tall and of goodly frame, yet had the scholar's air, about whose knees they would cluster and hear enchanting tales, the plots of which have long since got ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... have shining foreheads with big bumps of benevolence, like Flora Casby's father, and one inclines to believe that their eyes must be frequently filmed with an honest tear, if only because their vision is blurred. They are fond of lists of names which never suggest things; they are sparing of similes. If they use them they are careful to see they are not too definite, for a definite simile makes havoc of their constructions, by applying to them a certain ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... saw how the large moon dipped and dipped. Soon it would dip below the dim land's rim, and the olive trees would be blurred and twisted shadows in ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... Forward on the raft was heard a woman's shrill laugh, followed by the deeper laugh of a man. Their figures, blurred by the mist, were nearly invisible to Sergei, who, however, watched them curiously. The man appeared as a tall figure, standing with legs wide apart, holding a pole, and half turned toward a shorter ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... through it, the weeping and wailing of a nation! So the melody sinks slowly, to die away in one long-drawn, minor note, and Donald is looking across at me with his grave smile, and I will admit both his face and figure are sadly blurred. ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... something in the catalogue of mechanical devices which almost affects the mind with fatigue. Fifty years ago the ordinary citizen picked up his ideas of all that was going on in the world from a sorely-taxed news-sheet; and a very blurred idea he managed to get at the best. Poor folk had to do without the luxury of the news, and they were as much circumscribed mentally as though they had been cattle; we remember a village where even in 1852 the common people did not know ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... eternal rays. Not from that region which the highest thunders Is any mortal eye so far removed, In whatsoever sea it deepest sinks, As there from Beatrice my sight; but this Was nothing unto me; because her image Descended not to me by medium blurred." (XXXI, 52.) ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... beautiful. Up to the hour that she let go she had lived as they live who are drugged. She had looked on life with her senses blurred and her actions largely ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... The general blurred effect in Raymond's mind was one of disagreeable sound, which made speech almost impossible. The din drove at him from above and below; and it was accompanied by a thousand unfamiliar movements of flying bands ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... (especially their earlier ones of ocular discomfort, impaired vision, haloes around the light, and dilated pupil) with social excitement, anxiety, worry, anger or fatigue. A patient of mine gave up her card parties, because an exciting game generally ended in blurred vision, a rainbow around the light, and a dilated pupil, and sometimes an aching eye. Another woman watching beside her dying husband and exposed to extreme cold, had her first attack of glaucoma, so severe as to destroy the sight of one eye. The other ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... out in skiagrams; instead of the well-defined narrow line which represents the epiphysial cartilage, there is an ill-defined, blurred zone of ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... with so rank a life Were it not well this fellow were plucked out— Seeing this is not an eye that doth offend, But a blurred glass it were no harm to break; Yea rather it were ...
— Chastelard, a Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... to Eleanor and then urged Noddy along the foothold cleft from the cliff. Above, the rock-wall rose to the mountain-top; beneath, Polly could not gauge the depth—it was too dreadful and was now blurred by fine drifts from ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... of the ploughed land crumbled beneath her heavy tread. The north wind grew stronger. When she reached the edge of the maple wood and looked up with swollen, tear-blurred eyes, she saw the grey branches moved by the wind, and the red squirrels leaped from branch to branch and tree to tree as if blown by the same air. She wandered up one side of the clearing and down the other, sometimes wading knee-deep in loud rustling maple leaves gathered in dry hollows ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... his eyes shut—a whole procession of pretty ladies, all floating in the dimness. Just their faces on a broad band of light, over which the gray mists rolled now and then and blurred the outlines. Then the faces would again shine out, smiling—gay ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... at the big Venusian. Their eyes locked for a moment and then he nodded his head and turned away. He pulled out the pocket compass and through blurred vision read the course beneath its wavering needle. He waved an arm in a direction to the right of ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell
... rebel. The sense of logic would be strained. The conception of the possible would be violated. A fearful consciousness of being guilty of uttering lies would persist, in spite of efforts to subdue reason. Language would break in the attempt to find words for the inexpressible, the message would be blurred and incoherent. The judge might pull himself together, feeling that the turbulent thought-waves of contending counsel form a much safer ground on which to pronounce truth than the fourth-dimensional hurricane ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby |
