The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: go tippling with them, and meet them where students congregate?
And I had nothing! And no one in Paris can understand that
nothing means NOTHING. When I even thought of revealing my
beggary, I had that nervous contraction of the throat which makes
a sick man believe that a ball rises up from the oesophagus into
the larynx.
"In later life I have met people born to wealth who, never having
wanted for anything, had never even heard this problem in the
rule of three: A young man is to crime as a five-franc piece is
to X.--These gilded idiots say to me, 'Why did you get into debt?
Why did you involve yourself in such onerous obligations?' They
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Herland by Charlotte Gilman: daringly for the future.
Ellador watched me think. She seemed to know pretty much
what was going on in my mind.
"It's because we began in a new way, I suppose. All our folks
were swept away at once, and then, after that time of despair,
came those wonder children--the first. And then the whole
breathless hope of us was for THEIR children--if they should have
them. And they did! Then there was the period of pride and
triumph till we grew too numerous; and after that, when it all
came down to one child apiece, we began to really work--to
make better ones."
 Herland |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Fanny Herself by Edna Ferber: bitten fingers in Madison Square. And the dog in the
sweater. And the feverish concentration of the piece-work
sewers in the window of the loft building.
She gave it up, selected a magazine, and decided to go in to
lunch.
There was nothing spectacular about the welcome she got on
her return to the office after this first trip. A firm that
counts its employees by the thousands, and its profits in
tens of millions, cannot be expected to draw up formal
resolutions of thanks when a heretofore flabby department
begins to show signs of red blood.
 Fanny Herself |