| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce: in a shriek!
He was now in full possession of his physical senses. They
were, indeed, preternaturally keen and alert. Something in
the awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted
and refined them that they made record of things never before
perceived. He felt the ripples upon his face and heard their
separate sounds as they struck. He looked at the forest on
the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves
and the veining of each leaf -- he saw the very insects upon
them: the locusts, the brilliant bodied flies, the gray
spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen: suspected ANY prepossession elsewhere, it could not be
in THAT quarter. 'THERE, to be sure,' said she, 'I might
have thought myself safe.' She was quite in an agony.
We consulted together, however, as to what should be done,
and at last she determined to send for Edward.
He came. But I am sorry to relate what ensued.
All that Mrs. Ferrars could say to make him put an end
to the engagement, assisted too as you may well suppose
by my arguments, and Fanny's entreaties, was of
no avail. Duty, affection, every thing was disregarded.
I never thought Edward so stubborn, so unfeeling before.
Sense and Sensibility |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: other methods of maintaining order than those they had always seen
practised and approved of. From children and animals it extended to
slaves and criminals. In the days of Moses it was limited to 39
lashes. In the early nineteenth century it had become an open
madness: soldiers were sentenced to a thousand lashes for trifling
offences, with the result (among others less mentionable) that the
Iron Duke of Wellington complained that it was impossible to get an
order obeyed in the British army except in two or three crack
regiments. Such frantic excesses of this disgusting neurosis provoked
a reaction against it; but the clamor for it by depraved persons never
ceased, and was tolerated by a nation trained to it from childhood in
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