| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: long time."
"Oh, centuries and centuries; so long," she said,
"that I'm sure I'm dead and buried, and this dear old
place is heaven;" which, for reasons he could not
define, struck Newland Archer as an even more
disrespectful way of describing New York society.
III.
It invariably happened in the same way.
Mrs. Julius Beaufort, on the night of her annual
ball, never failed to appear at the Opera; indeed, she
always gave her ball on an Opera night in order to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Unconscious Comedians by Honore de Balzac: that you keep a serious face, like the king on a five-franc piece, for
you are going to see a choice original, a man whose importance has
turned his head. In these days, my dear fellow, under our new
political dispensation, every human being tries to cover himself with
glory, and most of them cover themselves with ridicule; hence a lot of
living caricatures quite new to the world."
"If everybody gets glory, who can be famous?" said Gazonal.
"Fame! none but fools want that," replied Bixiou. "Your cousin wears
the cross, but I'm the better dressed of the two, and it is I whom
people are looking at."
After this remark, which may explain why orators and other great
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: Yes, she would marry him. And she stepped slowly, quietly on shore.
Probably she said one word only, letting her hand rest still in his. I
will marry you, she might have said, with her hand in his; but no more.
Time after time the same thrill had passed between them--obviously it
had, Lily thought, smoothing a way for her ants. She was not
inventing; she was only trying to smooth out something she had been
given years ago folded up; something she had seen. For in the rough
and tumble of daily life, with all those children about, all those
visitors, one had constantly a sense of repetition--of one thing
falling where another had fallen, and so setting up an echo which
chimed in the air and made it full of vibrations.
To the Lighthouse |
