| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The War in the Air by H. G. Wells: was deserted now, everything was still. One little abandoned
thing lay on a transverse path between town and road, a crumpled
heap of clothes with sprawling limbs....
"'Ave a look round," said Bert, and taking a path that ran
through the middle of the island he presently discovered the
wreckage of the two Asiatic aeroplanes that had fallen out of the
struggle that ended the Hohenzollern.
With the first he found the wreckage of an aeronaut too.
The machine had evidently dropped vertically and was badly
knocked about amidst a lot of smashed branches in a clump of
trees. Its bent and broken wings and shattered stays sprawled
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: Shakespeare's tomb.
"Nothing else matters in the world!" Mrs. Hilbery continued. "Names
aren't everything; it's what we feel that's everything. I didn't want
silly, kind, interfering letters. I didn't want your father to tell
me. I knew it from the first. I prayed that it might be so."
"You knew it?" Katharine repeated her mother's words softly and
vaguely, looking past her. "How did you know it?" She began, like a
child, to finger a tassel hanging from her mother's cloak.
"The first evening you told me, Katharine. Oh, and thousands of times
--dinner-parties--talking about books--the way he came into the room--
your voice when you spoke of him."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac: country-squires, the magistracy, and the "church party" laid the blame
on Madame du Bousquier. "She was too old," they said; "Monsieur du
Bousquier had married her too late. Besides, it was very lucky for the
poor woman; it was dangerous at her age to bear children!" When Madame
du Bousquier confided, weeping, her periodic despair to Mesdames du
Coudrai and du Ronceret, those ladies would reply,--
"But you are crazy, my dear; you don't know what you are wishing for;
a child would be your death."
Many men, whose hopes were fastened on du Bousquier's triumph, sang
his praises to their wives, who in turn repeated them to the poor wife
in some such speech as this:--
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