| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Octopus by Frank Norris: now."
"Well, I do know now," he exclaimed.
"It wasn't so much that you tried to do--what you did," answered
Hilma, the single deep swell from her waist to her throat rising
and falling in her emotion. "It was that you thought that you
could--that anybody could that wanted to--that I held myself so
cheap. Oh!" she cried, with a sudden sobbing catch in her
throat, "I never can forget it, and you don't know what it means
to a girl."
"Well, that's just what I do want," he repeated. "I want you to
forget it and have us be good friends."
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: will, without personal feelings of any kind, demand of you a
few shillings only, without the possibility, such is their
constitution, of retracting or altering their present
demand, and without the possibility, on your side, of appeal
to any other millions, why expose yourself to this
overwhelming brute force? You do not resist cold and
hunger, the winds and the waves, thus obstinately; you
quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities. You do
not put your head into the fire. But just in proportion as
I regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a
human force, and consider that I have relations to those
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: to mass, ought we not to begin by going ourselves? Religion, you
see, Armand, is a bond uniting all the conservative principles
which enable the rich to live in tranquillity. Religion and the
rights of property are intimately connected. It is certainly a
finer thing to lead a nation by ideas of morality than by fear of
the scaffold, as in the time of the Terror--the one method by
which your odious Revolution could enforce obedience. The priest
and the king--that means you, and me, and the Princess my
neighbour; and, in a word, the interests of all honest people
personified. There, my friend, just be so good as to belong to
your party, you that might be its Sylla if you had the slightest
|
