| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac: lick the dust off the floor of the Palais de Justice. If this
kind of business led to anything, I should not say no; but just
give me the names of five advocates here in Paris who by the time
that they are fifty are making fifty thousand francs a year! Bah!
I would sooner turn pirate on the high seas than have my soul
shrivel up inside me like that. How will you find the capital?
There is but one way, marry a woman who has money. There is no
fun in it. Have you a mind to marry? You hang a stone around your
neck; for if you marry for money, what becomes of our exalted
notions of honor and so forth? You might as well fly in the face
of social conventions at once. Is it nothing to crawl like a
Father Goriot |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: `what it was that had induced him to go out there?'
`Yes,' said I, and forthwith handed him the famous Report
for publication, if he thought fit. He glanced through
it hurriedly, mumbling all the time, judged `it would do,'
and took himself off with this plunder.
"Thus I was left at last with a slim packet of letters
and the girl's portrait. She struck me as beautiful--
I mean she had a beautiful expression. I know that the sunlight
ycan be made to lie, too, yet one felt that no manipulation
of light and pose could have conveyed the delicate shade
of truthfulness upon those features. She seemed ready
Heart of Darkness |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Talisman by Walter Scott: Stradiots, but of such rich stuff that he seemed to blaze with
gold and silver, and the milk-white plume fastened in his cap by
a clasp of diamonds seemed tall enough to sweep the clouds. The
noble steed which he reined bounded and caracoled, and displayed
his spirit and agility in a manner which might have troubled a
less admirable horseman than the Marquis, who gracefully ruled
him with the one hand, while the other displayed the baton, whose
predominancy over the ranks which he led seemed equally absolute.
Yet his authority over the Stradiots was more in show than in
substance; for there paced beside him, on an ambling palfrey of
soberest mood, a little old man, dressed entirely in black,
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