"Blear" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... found O'Farrell waiting for her, with the precious "Michael" struggling to free himself from his coverings. Hawkes soon had a cab alongside. He helped Peg into it: then she stretched out her arms and O'Farrell opened the sail-cloths and out sprang "Michael," dusty and dirty and blear-eyed, but oh! such a happy, fussy, affectionate, relieved little canine when he saw his beloved owner waiting for him. He made one spring at her, much to the lawyer's dignified amazement, and began to bark at her, and lick her face ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... going into the house for a few minutes, could have brought themselves to believe that it was such a very broad part of the road leading to destruction: but the landlord had some hazy notion on that point. He sat there day and night, and saw the destruction going on. He saw the blear-eyed, fuddled men that came to drown conscience in his stalls, and the slatternly women who came and went. Nevertheless he was a rosy, jocund fellow who appeared to have a good deal of the milk of human kindness about him, and would have looked on you with great ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... his wife, chose ten only of the best of the city who appeared to him most capable and eloquent. These were Bushy-haired Zeza, Bandy-legged Cecca, Wen-necked Meneca, Long-nosed Tolla, Humph-backed Popa, Bearded Antonella, Dumpy Ciulla, Blear-eyed Paola, Bald-headed Civonmetella, and Square-shouldered Jacova. Their names he wrote down on a sheet of paper; and then, dismissing the others, he arose with the Slave from under the canopy, and ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... drive globe dean craze creed tribe drone bean shape steep brine stone bead state sleek spire probe beam crape fleet bride shore lean fume smite blame clear mope spume spite flame drear mold fluke quite slate blear tore flume whine spade spear robe dure ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... refined young lady would care to find herself alone, even in the cheery daylight. If she came at all, she would be attended by a trusty escort. She would not get too close to people on the doorsteps, and she would shrink away in disgust and fear from a blear-eyed creature careering down the sidewalk on many-jointed legs. The delicate damsel would hasten home to wash and purify and perfume herself till the foul contact of Wheeler Street was utterly eradicated, and ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... opportunity of observing what may be called the charitable side of politics. For a whole month, or more, the burden of existence had been lifted from the shoulders of the homeless. No church or organization, looked out for these frowsy, blear-eyed and ragged wanderers who had failed to find a place in the scale of efficiency. For a whole month, I say, Mr. Judd Jason and his lieutenants made them their especial care; supported them in lodging-houses, induced the night clerks to give them attention; took the greatest pains ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... asked suddenly, spying the empty trencher on the floor. "There is a pasty and a cake in the buttery, and thou shalt have some of it if thou wilt not cry any more. Come, I cannot bear to see thee cry—it makes me weep myself; and that will blear mine eyes, and ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... rather, it reawoke in me the spirit of manhood. I seized him by the arm, tore him down upon the pavement, and held him, in spite of his frantic struggles. It was Jemmy Downes! Gaunt, ragged, sodden, blear-eyed, drivelling, the worn-out gin-drinker stood, his momentary paroxysm of strength ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... see themselves begirt by an array of savage creatures, such as they have never seen before, though they have had dealings with uncivilised beings in many lands. Two score ugly old women, wrinkled and blear-eyed, and with tangled hair hanging over their faces, every one a match for Macbeth's witches, and with them a number of old men stoop-shouldered, and of wizard aspect, each a very Caliban. Even the boys and girls have an impish, unearthly look, ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... be depended upon. I believe that there is, or may be, an art to "read the mind's construction in the face." But, then, in every species of reading, so much depends upon the eyes of the reader; if they are blear, or apt to dazzle, or inattentive, or strained with too much attention, the optic power will infallibly bring home false reports of what it reads. How often do we say, upon a cursory glance at a ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... this old man, bent and blear-eyed, was swept along the gangway like a chip on the tide. In pure lightness of heart a sailor, posted at the head of the plank, expedited him with a kick. "That'll do for good-bye to India," ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Hush then, dull QUACKS, your Mountebanking cease, COFFEE'S a speedier Cure for each Disease; How great its Vertues are, we hence may think, The Worlds third Part makes it their common Drink: In Breif, all you who Healths Rich Treasures Prize, And Court not Ruby Noses, or blear'd Eyes, But own Sobriety to be your Drift. And Love at once good Company and Thrift; To Wine no more make Wit and Coyn a Trophy, But come each Night and ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... was, tooth-shaken, and blear-eyed, Went on three feet, and sometime crept on four, With old lame bones, that rattled by his side; His scalp all piled, and he with eld forelore, His wither'd fist still knocking at Deaths door; Fumbling and drivelling, as he draws his breath; For brief—the shape ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... for you to wrestle with, Asa Thor," said the King. Thor looked round and saw an old woman hobbling toward him. She was blear-eyed and toothless. "This is Ellie, my ancient nurse," said the Giant King. "She is the one we would have you ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... tears shall flow faster and faster, Brim over and baffle resistance, And roll down blear'd roads to each distance Of past desolation and years; Till they cover the place of each sorrow, And leave you no past and no morrow: For what man is able to master And stem ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... witch!" cried a merry girl, As they rounded the point where Goody Cole Sat by her door with her wheel atwirl, A bent and blear-eyed poor old soul. "Oho!" she muttered, "ye're brave to-day! But I hear the little waves laugh and say, 'The broth will be cold that waits at home; For it's one to go, but another ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... entered the saloon where Manley was still drinking heavily, his face crimson and blear-eyed and brutalized, his speech thickened disgustingly. He was sprawled in an armchair, waving an empty glass in an erratic attempt to mark the time of a college ditty six or seven years out of date, which he was trying to sing. He leered up ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... the hail, but promised the blear-eyed sentinels in the bows of the ship a lively five minutes when the watch was relieved. Slowly the Andromeda swung to the west. Even more slowly, or so it appeared to the anxious man on the ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... sentiments, let him look into Salmasius's Responsio. There he will see the first scholar of his age not thinking it unbecoming to taunt Milton with his blindness, in such language as this: "a puppy, once my pretty little man, now blear-eyed, or rather a blindling; having never had any mental vision, he has now lost his bodily sight; a silly coxcomb, fancying himself a beauty; an unclean beast, with nothing more human about him than his guttering ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... sound of uneven footsteps made the poor widow start to her feet, and Sally to cry out. The next moment the door was rudely shaken, and then Jim staggered into the room, haggard, blear-eyed, muttering to himself savagely. The sight of his mother and sister seemed partially to sober him, for the spirit within him bowed instinctively before the beauty of holiness, which neither poverty nor terror could obliterate from ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson
... his blear-eyed wife, but a glance sufficed to tell Mackenzie that the news was already told. So he plunged at once into the business, shifting the beaded sheath prominently to the fore ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... dropsies, pleurisies, splenetic and melancholy passions, hurt the eyes, cause a bad temperature, and ill disposition of the whole body, with bad colour." This Jobertus stiffly maintains, Paradox, lib. 1. part. 5, that it causeth blear eyes, bad colour, and many loathsome diseases to such as use it: this which they say, stands with good reason; for as geographers relate, the water of Astracan breeds worms in such as drink it. [1390] Axius, or ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... harum-skarum, roly-poly. Words of this type are all but universal. Such examples as the Russian Chudo-Yudo (a dragon), the Chinese ping-pang "rattling of rain on the roof,"[46] the Tibetan kyang-kyong "lazy," and the Manchu porpon parpan "blear-eyed" are curiously reminiscent, both in form and in psychology, of words nearer home. But it can hardly be said that the duplicative process is of a distinctively grammatical significance in English. We must turn to other languages for illustration. Such cases as Hottentot ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... children grunted in loving communion of dirt. At the door, rapt apparently in the contemplation of the mountain peaks which glowed rich orange in the last lingering sun-rays, but really watching which way the sheep on the moor were taking, stood the innkeeper, a brawny, sodden-visaged, blear-eyed six feet of brutishness, holding up his hose with one hand, for want of points, and clawing with the other his elf-locks, on which a fair sprinkling of feathers might denote: first, that he was just out of bed, having been out sheep-stealing all the night before; and secondly, that ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... stood snuffling by, With her three frowsy blowsy brats o' babes, The scum o' the kennel, cream o' the filth-heap—Faugh! Aie, aie, aie, aie! ot?t?t?t?toi, ('Stead which we blurt out Hoighty toighty now) - And the baker and candlestickmaker, and Jack and Gill, Blear'd Goody this and queasy Gaffer that. Ask the schoolmaster. Take ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... blear-eyed man, but he were all blind of wit, might see the solution of this reason; and though he were blind he might grope the solution, but if his feeling him failed. For if this reason were aught worth, by such manner arguing men might prove that the ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... terrible in the hands of indignant genius, branding the audacious forehead of falsehood or pollution. But ridicule in the hands either of cold-blooded or infuriated Malice, is harmless as a birch-rod in the palsied fingers of a superannuated beldam, who in her blear-eyed dotage has lost her school. The Bird of Paradise might float in the sunshine unharmed all its beautiful life long, although all the sportsmen of Cockaigne were to keep firing at the star-like plumage during the Christmas ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... whatever that the man whose name is in every mouth did the work; but because our personal impressions of him do not correspond with our conceptions of a powerful man, we abate or withdraw our admiration, and attribute his success to lucky accident. This blear-eyed, taciturn, timid man, whose knowledge of many things is manifestly imperfect, whose inaptitude for many things is apparent, can HE be the creator of such glorious works? Can HE be the large and patient thinker, the delicate humourist, the impassioned poet? Nature seems to have ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... is seldom made but among equals. And yet if it should so happen that there were a mutual good will between them, it is in no wise firm nor very long lived; that is to say, among such as are morose and more circumspect than needs, as being eagle-sighted into his friends' faults, but so blear-eyed to their own that they take not the least notice of the wallet that hangs behind their own shoulders. Since then the nature of man is such that there is scarce anyone to be found that is not subject to ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... The blear eyed 'scapes the pits * Wherein the lynx eyed fall: A word the wise man slays * And saves the natural: The Moslem fails of food * The Kafir feasts in hall: What art or act is man's? * God's will ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... The old ones, palsied, blear, and hoar, Their breasts in anguish beat - They've seen him seventy times before, How ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... court-house door, Stretched his hands above the passing poor. Booth saw not, but led his queer ones there Round and round the mighty court-house square. Yet in an instant all that blear review Marched on spotless, clad in raiment new. The lame were straightened, withered limbs uncurled And blind eyes opened on ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... a person of singularly equable temperament. But to have an offer which he had made only with self-sacrificing effort thus cavalierly received by a red-nosed, blear-eyed, impudent little chittermouse (thus, I must reluctantly admit, did he mentally characterize his new acquaintance), was just a ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... repeated twice or thrice at the room-door, brought into the apartment a short, thin, weasen, blear-eyed old woman, palsy-stricken and hideously ugly, who, wiping her shrivelled face upon her dirty apron, inquired, in that subdued tone in which deaf ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... had not been scrapping with third- and fourth-rate heavies, and sparring with real, live ones for nothing. The mate's fist whistled through empty air; the blear-eyed hunk of clay that had seemed such easy prey to him was metamorphosed on the instant into an alert, catlike bundle of steel sinews, and Billy Byrne swung that awful right with the pile-driver weight, that even The Big Smoke himself had acknowledged respect for, ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Trojan war upwards and downwards, full of instances of such strange inexplicable passions? Was not Helen, by the most moderate calculation, ninety years of age when she went off with His Royal Highness Prince Paris of Troy? Was not Madame La Valliere ill-made, blear-eyed, tallow-complexioned, scraggy, and with hair like tow? Was not Wilkes the ugliest, charmingest, most successful man in the world? Such instances might be carried out so as to fill a volume; but cui bono? Love is fate, and not will; its origin not to be explained, its progress irresistible: ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pale its ineffectual fire [Hamlet]. render dim &c adj.; dim, bedim^, obscure; darken, tone down. Adj. dim, dull, lackluster, dingy, darkish, shorn of its beams, dark 421. faint, shadowed forth; glassy; cloudy; misty &c (opaque) 426; blear; muggy^, fuliginous^; nebulous, nebular; obnubilated^, overcast, crepuscular, muddy, lurid, leaden, dun, dirty; looming &c v.. pale &c (colorless) 429; confused ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... own attitude in the matter affords painful proof that it is one of the latest. They will understand some day that a steatopygous "Hottentot Venus" is no more beautiful because an African finds her attractive, than an ugly, bloated, blear-eyed harlot is beautiful because she pleases ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... a red-nosed, blear-eyed tramp, of low-toned, rowdy style, Give an interductory hiccup, an' then swaggered up the aisle. Then thro' that holy atmosphere there crep' a sense er sin, An' thro' thet air of sanctity the odor uv ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... heed to their commands, but made straight onward. Then one blear-eyed and scab-faced cripple scrambled up and struck off his cap with a crutch. He picked it up again without a look or a word, and strode away. But next morning, at early prayers, there was a place empty at the ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... scattered wide, They shall forget their GOD, and see no trace, Save dimly, of their Great Original. 320 Rude caves shall be their dwellings: till, with noise Of multitudes, imperial cities rise. But the Arch Fiend, the foe of GOD and man, Shall fling his spells; and, 'mid illusions drear, Blear Superstition shall arise, the earth Eclipsing.—Deep in caves,[158] vault within vault Far winding; or in night of thickest woods, Where no bird sings; or 'mid huge circles gray Of uncouth stone, her aspect wild, and pale As the terrific flame that ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... sagacity, acuteness, and clearness of head. What part he had in the brilliant effusions of Mirabeau, and in the French Revolution, may be seen by his posthumous work, just published at Paris, entitled Souvenirs de Mirabeau. He was a short, thick man, of coarse features, blear eyed, and slovenly in his dress; but of mild manners, hospitable, an excellent story-teller, and much beloved. I think he had been at one time librarian to old Lord Lansdowne. He died at Milan, in 1829, aged ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various
... sequi.[121] You that be wise, and ever mean to thrive, O, study not these toys we sluggards use, But follow arms, and wait on barbarous wars. Young men, young boys, beware of schoolmasters; They will infect you, mar you, blear your eyes: They seek to lay the curse of God on you, Namely, confusion of languages, Wherewith those that the Tower of Babel built Accursed were in the world's infancy. Latin, it was the speech of infidels; Logic hath nought to say in a true cause; Philosophy is curiosity; ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... him to hold his speed, and, finally, it will work upon the nerves and eyesight of the batter. The batter will grow impatient and anxious, and unless his eyes are very strong the long strain in a bright light will blear his sight. ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... turn off the gas burning in the middle of the shop, Mr Verloc descended into the abyss of moral reflections. With the insight of a kindred temperament he pronounced his verdict. A lazy lot—this Karl Yundt, nursed by a blear-eyed old woman, a woman he had years ago enticed away from a friend, and afterwards had tried more than once to shake off into the gutter. Jolly lucky for Yundt that she had persisted in coming up time after time, or else there would have been no one now to help him out of the 'bus by the ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... the bedstead he died on; that ugly slanting contrivance used to be put under his pillow in the days when his breath came hard; there is his old chair with both arms gone, symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing earthly left to lean on; there is the large wooden reel which the blear-eyed old deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked him graciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it out decently to the limbo of troublesome conveniences. And there are old leather portmanteaus, like stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in gaunt hunger ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... mine, and, till I forget, Ye are mine forever and aye, Mine, wherever your wild wings go, While shrill winds whistle across the snow And the skies are blear and grey. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... more heathenish ones were never witnessed. The ceremonies during our brief visit consisted of grotesque dancing, beating of drums, and blowing upon a shrill fife before a rude altar, upon which incense was burning. There was also marching, by these musicians, around the altar, led by a dirty, blear-eyed priest. The scene was strongly suggestive of a powwow as performed by the Digger Indians of California. So great was the din, we were quite willing to take for granted the presence, in another part of the temple, of the tooth of Buddha, without personal inspection, and hastened to get away from ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... attentive, chin in hand, and his eyes upon the sunny road, started violently. "Two horses instead of one," he repeated, with a catch of the breath. In a moment he was upon his feet, and the innkeeper, had he looked up and had he been less blear-eyed and dull, might have seen an approach to the old Fairfax Cary—colour in cheek and light ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... the Black Country, from a little window, Before I slept, across the haggard wastes Of dust and ashes, I saw Titanic shafts Like shadowy columns of wan-hope arise To waste, on the blear sky, their slow sad wreaths Of smoke, their infinitely sad slow prayers. Then, as night deepened, the blast-furnaces, Red smears upon the sulphurous blackness, turned All that sad region to a City of Dis, Where naked, sweating ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... physical prostration. The sketch he has left of himself [39] suggests a physique neither interesting nor vigorous. He was at 44 short, fat, and good- natured looking (rallied, we learn, by Augustus on his obesity), blear- eyed, somewhat dyspeptic, and prematurely grey; and ten years, we may be sure, had not improved the portrait. In the autumn of 8 B.C. Maecenas, who had long been himself a sufferer, succumbed to the effects ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... man, with a curling, grizzled head, and a well-featured face. It is possible that in his youth the word 'dapper' may have applied to him; a forgotten fact which perhaps accounted for his nickname. He gazed with an open mouth and puzzled, blear eyes at the ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... But there the friendly veil was necessarily with drawn, and the first object that presented itself to the highbred Englishwoman was an old man clad in a short tartan coat and striped woollen night-cap, with blear eyes and shaking hands, who vainly strove to open ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... felt in the House of Commons from his first entrance. All parliamentary bodies are swayed by a few persons—the working members are the exception. The horse-racing and cockfighting contingent in the House of Commons is well represented; the blear eyes, the poddy pudge, the bulbous beak—all these are in evidence. If one man out of ten knows what is going on, it is well; and this is equally true of Washington, for our representatives do not always ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... the night I awoke; what woke me I suppose I shall never know. But when I awoke I sat up suddenly as if I had never been asleep. I was face to face with the worst-looking creature I had ever seen in my life, black and blear-eyed and ugly, on his hands and knees in the tunnel beyond the lantern drawing my gun toward him by the stock. Then Kaiser sprang up like any wild beast; but I held him ...
— Track's End • Hayden Carruth
... cruising to" So, to come back to my story. I went aft, and mounted the small poop, and looked towards the aforesaid moon, a glorious resplendent tropical moon, and not the paper lantern affair hanging in an atmosphere of fog and smoke, about which your blear—eyed poets haven't so much. By the by, these gentry are fond of singing of the blessed sun—were they sailors they would bless the moon also, and be—to them, in place of writing much wearisome poetry regarding her blighting propensities. But I have lost the end ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... afraid of something, though some hid it better than others; and he had added that Dan Meldrum had the murderer's dread lest vengeance overtake him unexpectedly. Roy knew now that his partner had spoken the true word. At that last stinging sentence, alarm had jumped to the blear eyes of ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... grew angry, the false modesty left his face, his tall form straightened itself, and he stared round with his blear, evil-looking eyes. ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... he got up very late and dragged himself, blear-eyed and sallow, into his sitting-room to see if there were any letters. A curious feeling shot through his heart when he recognised the handwriting ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... were couched in whispers. The men around him were blear-eyed and haggard-faced, their skins dry and bluish, and not a one was clad in more than undershirt and trousers. Alive and breathing, they were—but breathing grotesquely, horribly. They made awful noises at it; they panted, in quick, shallow sucks. ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter |
