DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • More 'Out of the blue' Quotes from Famous Books

... when Titurel was walking alone in the woods, he was favored by the vision of an angel. The celestial messenger sailed down to earth out of the blue, and announced in musical tones that the Lord had chosen him to be the guardian of the Holy Grail on Montsalvatch (which some authors believe to have been in Spain), and that it behooved him to set his house in order and obey the ...

— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber

... other phrase so adequate for describing his condition of mind as the old one concerning head and heels. There had rushed on him, not out of the blue, but, what was even more surprising, out of the very dingy sky of Hackney Wick (and Turner Road, at that!), this astonishing young man, keen-eyed, brown-faced, muscular, who had turned out to be a school-fellow of his own, and a school-fellow whose reputation, during the three hours since they ...

— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson

... people would come and put up schools for the colored children but the white people in Mississippi said they were not good people and would criticize them. Sometimes the schools would get busted up. We studied out of the Blue Back speller and an arithmetic and a dictionary. I could spell and give the meaning of most nigh every word in ...

— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration

... was its appearance! A reddish-brown mass of rock, rising abruptly out of the blue water, really a kind of crown in form, but not more than a couple of square rods in extent, and about three feet high at ...

— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss

... is all the light and life we ever have. Men make botany. God makes flowers breathing their freshening fragrance noiselessly up into your face. Man makes astronomy. God makes the stars, shaking their firelight out of the blue down into your wondering eyes on a clear moonless night. Man makes theology. And theology has its place, when it's kept in its place. God gives ...

— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon

... cross-roads where the church rears its roofless walls, you will understand what the Abomination of Desolation means. Occasionally a body of troops, moving in small detachments at generous intervals, trudges by, on its way to or from the trenches. Occasionally a big howitzer shell swings lazily out of the blue and drops with a crash or a dull thud—according to the degree of resistance encountered—among the crumbling cottages. ...

— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)

... First a shower of shells dropping all along the lower ridges and out over the surface of the Bay. Very pretty the shells—at half a mile! Prince of Wales's feathers springing suddenly out of the blue to a loud hammer stroke; high explosives: or else the shrapnel; pure white, twisting a moment and pirouetting as children in their nightgowns pirouette, then gliding off the field two or three together, ...

— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton

... James did oust him from his posts about the Court in favour of leal Scotchmen, Raleigh would brace himself by some fresh expedition against Cadiz, some new settlement of Virginia or Guiana. In the midst of such schemes, the blow of his unexpected arrest would come upon him out of the blue. He could bear poverty, neglect, hardships, even death itself; but imprisonment, with a disgraceful execution as the only end of it, that he was not at first prepared to endure. He had tasted captivity in the Tower once before; he ...

— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse

... Penwick with a face as delicately tinted as the blossoms of the peach that flaunted their beauty at some distance. She appeared to be arranging violets—that still sparkled with rain—in an oblong porcelain box that lay flat upon the casement. Her white jewelled fingers flitted in and out of the blue depths. Her small white teeth were but half eclipsed and there fluttered forth from her parted lips a low humming that keyed and blended with the organ. Her soft white dress enveloped her mould loosely; her long flowing sleeves, ...

— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne

... Winkelried was bound, lies at the distance of three leagues from the head of the lake, or the point where it receives the Rhone; and Geneva, the port from which the reader has just seen her take her departure, is divided by that river as it glances out of the blue basin of the Leman again, to traverse the fertile fields of France, on its hurried ...

— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper

... attack the earth with toothed, cogged, and spiked engines that would be monstrous in the shops, but here are only speckles on the yellow grass. Even the locomotive is cowed. A train of freight cars is passing along a line that comes out of the blue and goes on till it meets the blue again. Elsewhere the train would move off with a joyous, vibrant roar. Here it steals away down the vista of the telegraph poles with an awed whisper—steals away and ...

— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... of old Greece. It was a Maxfield Parrish reminiscence from the Arabian Nights. Genii might be expected to rise from those troubled depths, or golden princes, astride winged dragons, to swoop down out of the blue to ...

— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... not very illuminating on the subject when he questioned her, merely answering him with an affirmative when he asked her whether she had seen a good deal of Killigrew since the old days, and he was forced to keep company with his curiosity till Killigrew should appear out of the blue a few days hence. ...

— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... bird came out of the blue, and sailed on slow wing over the hollow and ravine. He knew instinctively that it was the bald eagle of the night before, drawn back with a fascination it could not resist to the place where it had been frightened so badly. But ...

— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler

... I think of it, the white cotton spread out on her knees, in such contrast to the rich olive of her complexion and her black shiny hair, while she knits away so merrily, glancing up occasionally with those liquid, laughing eyes to Giuseppe, who is watching her as if she were an angel right out of the blue sky, I am tempted not to tell this story further, but to leave the happy two there at the open gate of life, and to believe that ...

— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... skin of the prickly-pear—the sharp points bristling terror to invaders. On his left arm he carried his trusty shield, made of the back of the golden beetle, and his right hand grasped his sharp blade, fashioned out of the blue sword-grass. ...

— The Fairy Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow

... sunny morning. Bulls, cows, sheep, pigs, goats stood and lay about under the bare little trees on the platform high over the valley: some one had kindled a great fire of brush-wood, and men crowded round, out of the blue frost. From laden asses vegetables were unloaded, from little carts all kinds of things, boots, pots, tin-ware, hats, sweet-things, and heaps of corn and beans and seeds. By eight o'clock in the December morning the market was in full swing: ...

— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... Out of the blue heaven fell the bolt. The mails on May Day morning brought to the desk of every manager of every industry in Blackwater, and to every building contractor, a formal document setting forth in terms courteous but firm the demands of the executives of the allied ...

— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor

... extinct, 'sunk,' as they say, 'in the mud of the Loire;' Republicanism dominates without and within: what, therefore, on the 15th day of March, 1794, is this? Arrestment, sudden really as a bolt out of the Blue, has hit strange victims: Hebert Pere Duchene, Bibliopolist Momoro, Clerk Vincent, General Ronsin; high Cordelier Patriots, redcapped Magistrates of Paris, Worshippers of Reason, Commanders of Revolutionary Army! Eight short ...

— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... out of the blue. One morning I drew a tin pail of water, bright and splashing from the well, and turned to pour a little of it into the birds drinking-trough, a stone hollowed out at the top. I did not do so, however, for a good reason—a man was ...

— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine

... say something about this affair to some one who can understand me. Imagine my feelings when, out of the blue, as one might say, Lans brought this girl home and said, "I'm going to leave her with you, Aunt Olive, until I can see my way clear. I am brother to her and she is sister to me until—the way's made plain." ...

— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock

... white clouds heard them, And stepped from out of the blue; And each laid a little child softly Upon its ...

— Marigold Garden • Kate Greenaway

... big motor boat swept out of the blue lagoon, and headed for St. Kitts, for it was planned to leave Ben, and once more take up ...

— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose

... something to the very welkin that sends down such harsh hardness; and I hurried my eyes out of the open grave, only to find them again arrested by the same soul that had stood beside Doctor Percival and Alice in her death. They said something to me, kinder than ever came out of the blue vault, and yet they awoke the fever of resistance. I would have no thought but that of Alice. What right had any other to come in then ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various

... undertake any "picture puzzle work" on this occasion. It was plain as day that this tower must be used as an artillery observation post by the enemy. From there he could see the fall of shells from his batteries and know whether they were "on" or not. Out of the blue sky the next morning, came a German artillery concentration which brought the tower down like a house of cards, and many British soldiers billeted in the neighborhood were ...

— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various

... place of any note we came to, as day broke out of the blue fog which rose from the swampy forest, was Holland River Bridge, an extraordinary structure, half bridge, half road, over a swamp created by that river in times long gone by; a level tract of marsh and wild rice as far as the eye can reach, full of ducks and deer, with the Holland ...

— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... not reply. The face of the dead young officer coming towards him out of the blue smoke rose as vividly as on that memorable day. The picture and letter he had taken from the dead man's breast, which he had retained ever since; the romantic and fruitless quest he had made for the fair original in after days; and the strange and fateful interest in her which had ...

— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... bewildered nor swept away from our moorings, nor led to vain regrets and paralysing retrospects when the changes that must come do come, sometimes slowly and imperceptibly, sometimes with stunning suddenness, like a bolt out of the blue. If life is truly represented under the figure of a journey, nothing is more certain than that we sleep in a fresh hospice every night, and leave behind us every day scenes that we shall never traverse again. What madness, then, to be putting out eager and desperate hands to clutch ...

— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren