| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: loud at the thought that Hume had stuck in a bog and an old woman
rescued him on condition he said the Lord's Prayer, and chuckling to
himself he strolled off to his study. Mrs Ramsay, bringing Prue back
into throwing catches again, from which she had escaped, asked,
"Did Nancy go with them?"
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(Certainly, Nancy had gone with them, since Minta Doyle had asked it
with her dumb look, holding out her hand, as Nancy made off, after
lunch, to her attic, to escape the horror of family life. She
supposed she must go then. She did not want to go. She did not want to
be drawn into it all. For as they walked along the road to the cliff
To the Lighthouse |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas: was something mournful, solemn, and terrible in the count's
manner. "Besides," continued he, in so changed a tone that
no one would have supposed it was the same person speaking
-- "besides, who says that it will begin again?"
"It has returned, count," exclaimed Morrel; "that is why I
hastened to you."
"Well, what do you wish me to do? Do you wish me, for
instance, to give information to the procureur?" Monte
Cristo uttered the last words with so much meaning that
Morrel, starting up, cried out, "You know of whom I speak,
count, do you not?"
The Count of Monte Cristo |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer: "Somehow I got upon my feet, or dreamed I did--God knows where dreaming ended
and reality began. Gentlemen maybe you'll conclude I went mad last night,
but as I stood holding on to the bedrail I heard the blood throbbing through
my arteries with a noise like a screw-propeller. I started laughing.
The laughter issued from my lips with a shrill whistling sound that pierced
me with physical pain and seemed to wake the echoes of the whole block.
I thought myself I was going mad, and I tried to command my will--
to break the power of the chloral--for I concluded that I had accidentally
taken an overdose.
"Then the walls of my bedroom started to recede, till at last I
stood holding on to a bed which had shrunk to the size of a
The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu |
