The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: behind. It gave him confidence in himself, and when Teddy came
running down the path, Rikki-tikki was ready to be petted.
But just as Teddy was stooping, something wriggled a little in
the dust, and a tiny voice said: "Be careful. I am Death!" It
was Karait, the dusty brown snakeling that lies for choice on the
dusty earth; and his bite is as dangerous as the cobra's. But he
is so small that nobody thinks of him, and so he does the more
harm to people.
Rikki-tikki's eyes grew red again, and he danced up to Karait
with the peculiar rocking, swaying motion that he had inherited
from his family. It looks very funny, but it is so perfectly
The Jungle Book |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: so scornfully above the common lot of men, now paid full
allegiance to this humiliating law. The snake in his bosom seemed
the symbol of a monstrous egotism to which everything was
referred, and which he pampered, night and day, with a continual
and exclusive sacrifice of devil worship.
He soon exhibited what most people considered indubitable tokens
of insanity. In some of his moods, strange to say, he prided and
gloried himself on being marked out from the ordinary experience
of mankind, by the possession of a double nature, and a life
within a life. He appeared to imagine that the snake was a
divinity,--not celestial, it is true, but darkly infernal,--and
Mosses From An Old Manse |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Blue Flower by Henry van Dyke: How strangely these familiar words fell upon the tired
heart of Artaban! They had led him for a lifetime over land
and sea. And now they came to him mysteriously, like a
message of despair. The King had arisen, but he had been
denied and cast out. He was about to perish. Perhaps he was
already dying. Could it be the same who had been born in
Bethlehem thirty-three years ago, at whose birth the star had
appeared in heaven, and of whose coming the prophets had
spoken?
Artaban's heart beat unsteadily with that troubled,
doubtful apprehension which is the excitement of old age. But
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