| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Hated Son by Honore de Balzac: "Madame!"
At that word, the frightened mother carried away the child whose heart
was beating like that of a bird caught in its nest. Whether innocence
has a power which the hardest men cannot escape, or whether the count
regretted his violence and feared to plunge into despair a creature so
necessary to his pleasures and also to his worldly prosperity, it is
certain that his voice was as soft as it was possible to make it when
his wife returned.
"Jeanne, my dear," he said, "do not be angry with me; give me your
hand. One never knows how to trust you women. I return, bringing you
fresh honors and more wealth, and yet, tete-Dieu! you receive me like
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: the family in the Upper Alps.
Horrorstruck at the news, Charles waited for better times in a valley
of Mont Genevra; and there he remained till 1799, subsisting on a few
louis which his father had put into his hand at starting. Finally,
when twenty-three years of age, and without other fortune than his
fine presence and that southern beauty which, when it reaches
perfection, may be called sublime (of which Antinous, the favorite of
Adrian, is the type), Charles resolved to wager his Provencal audacity
--taking it, like many another youth, for a vocation--on the red cloth
of war. On his way to the base of the army at Nice he met the Breton.
The pair became intimate, partly from the contrasts in their
Modeste Mignon |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: As we sat at the table, Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert glances
at each other. Grandmother had told me while she was getting supper
that he was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy and had led
an adventurous life in the Far West among mining-camps and cow outfits.
His iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain pneumonia,
and he had drifted back to live in a milder country for a while.
He had relatives in Bismarck, a German settlement to the north of us,
but for a year now he had been working for grandfather.
The minute supper was over, Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper to me
about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a sale;
he had been riding him to find out whether he had any bad tricks,
My Antonia |
