| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: attributed to the circumstance that her life had turned, in a
great measure, from passion and feeling to thought. Standing
alone in the world -- alone, as to any dependence on society, and
with little Pearl to be guided and protected -- alone, and
hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she not scorned to
consider it desirable -- she cast away the fragment a broken
chain. The world's law was no law for her mind. It was an age
in which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more
active and a wider range than for many centuries before. Men of
the sword had overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder than these
had overthrown and rearranged -- not actually, but within the
The Scarlet Letter |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: since Mary openly placed Farebrother above everybody, and these
women were all evidently encouraging the affair. He, was feeling
sure that he should have no chance of speaking to Mary,
when Mr. Farebrother said--
"Fred, help me to carry these drawers back into my study--
you have never seen my fine new study. Pray come too, Miss Garth.
I want you to see a stupendous spider I found this morning."
Mary at once saw the Vicar's intention. He had never since the
memorable evening deviated from his old pastoral kindness towards her,
and her momentary wonder and doubt had quite gone to sleep.
Mary was accustomed to think rather rigorously of what was probable,
Middlemarch |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: follow the cut of it, said Yorick.--'Tis all cut through, an' please your
reverence, said the corporal, with drains and bogs; and besides, there was
such a quantity of rain fell during the siege, the whole country was like a
puddle,--'twas that, and nothing else, which brought on the flux, and which
had like to have killed both his honour and myself; now there was no such
thing, after the first ten days, continued the corporal, for a soldier to
lie dry in his tent, without cutting a ditch round it, to draw off the
water;--nor was that enough, for those who could afford it, as his honour
could, without setting fire every night to a pewter dish full of brandy,
which took off the damp of the air, and made the inside of the tent as warm
as a stove.--
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