| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: without you."
"I can never sit to you again, Basil. It is impossible!"
he exclaimed, starting back.
The painter stared at him. "My dear boy, what nonsense!"
he cried. "Do you mean to say you don't like what I did of you?
Where is it? Why have you pulled the screen in front of it?
Let me look at it. It is the best thing I have ever done.
Do take the screen away, Dorian. It is simply disgraceful
of your servant hiding my work like that. I felt the room looked
different as I came in."
"My servant has nothing to do with it, Basil. You don't imagine I let
The Picture of Dorian Gray |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Within the Tides by Joseph Conrad: to himself: "This fellow will end by giving me away. The last
thing that I . . . No! That mustn't be." And feeling his hand
being forced he discovered the whole extent of his cowardice.
CHAPTER X
That morning wandering about his plantation, more like a frightened
soul than its creator and master, he dodged the white parasol
bobbing up here and there like a buoy adrift on a sea of dark-green
plants. The crop promised to be magnificent, and the fashionable
philosopher of the age took other than a merely scientific interest
in the experiment. His investments were judicious, but he had
always some little money lying by, for experiments.
Within the Tides |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson: certain fortune; two clever lads have individually expressed to us
their discontent with a system which taxes industry to pamper
idleness; and I hear that in one village of Savaii a law has been
passed forbidding gifts under the penalty of a sharp fine.
Under this economic regimen, the unpopularity of taxes, which
strike all at the same time, which expose the industrious to a
perfect siege of mendicancy, and the lazy to be actually condemned
to a day's labour, may be imagined without words. It is more
important to note the concurrent relaxation of all sense of
property. From applying for help to kinsmen who are scarce
permitted to refuse, it is but a step to taking from them (in the
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