| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: "The DAMSEL was?"
"Even so, dear lord -- and her hair was white under
the garland --"
"Celluloid teeth, nine dollars a set, as like as not --
the loose-fit kind, that go up and down like a portcullis
when you eat, and fall out when you laugh."
"The second damsel was of thirty winter of age,
with a circlet of gold about her head. The third damsel
was but fifteen year of age --"
Billows of thought came rolling over my soul, and
the voice faded out of my hearing!
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: Then followed the usual epistolary formulas.
It was half-past seven in the morning when the man consummated the
sacrifice of his ideas; he burned everything, the toil of years.
Fatigued by the pressure of thought, overcome by mental suffering, he
fell asleep with his head on the back of his armchair. He was wakened
by a curious sensation, and found his hands covered with his wife's
tears and saw her kneeling before him. Celestine had read the
resignation. She could measure the depth of his fall. They were now to
be reduced to live on four thousand francs a year; and that day she
had counted up her debts,--they amounted to something like thirty-two
thousand francs! The most ignoble of all wretchedness had come upon
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: innocent; but whether they have been right or wrong in their view of
facts, the Scotch partisans of Mary have always--as far as I know--
been right in their view of morals; they have never deigned to admit
Mary's guilt, and then to palliate it by those sentimental, or
rather sensual, theories of human nature, too common in a certain
school of French literature, too common, alas! in a certain school
of modern English novels. They have not said, "She did it; but
after all, was the deed so very inexcusable?" They have said, "The
deed was inexcusable: but she did not do it." And so the Scotch
admirers of Mary, who have numbered among them many a pure and
noble, as well as many a gifted spirit, have kept at least
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