The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic: powdered remains of last year's foliage; the leaves above
him were showing the first yellow stains of autumn.
A sweet smell of ripening nuts was thick upon the air,
and busy rustlings and chirpings through the stillness told
how the chipmunks and squirrels were attending to their harvest.
Theron had no ears for these noises of the woodland.
He had halted, and was searching through the little
vistas offered between the stout gray trunks of the
beeches for some sign of a more sophisticated sort.
Yes! there were certainly voices to be heard, down in
the hollow. And now, beyond all possibility of mistake,
 The Damnation of Theron Ware |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Underground City by Jules Verne: minutes empty itself, and disappear into the bowels of the earth.
There was nothing for it but to erase Loch Katrine from the map of
Scotland until (by public subscription) it could be refilled, care being
of course taken, in the first place, to stop the rent up tight.
This catastrophe would have been the death of Sir Walter Scott,
had he still been in the world.
The accident was explicable when it was ascertained that,
between the bed of the lake and the vast cavity beneath,
the geological strata had become reduced to a thin layer,
incapable of longer sustaining the weight of water.
Now, although to most people this event seemed plainly due
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: That, then, is the first thing to make sure of;--that you are not
yet perfectly well informed on the most abstruse of all possible
subjects, and that if you care to behave with modesty or propriety,
you had better be silent about it.
The second thing which you may make sure of is, that however good
you may be, you have faults; that however dull you may be, you can
find out what some of them are; and that however slight they may be,
you had better make some--not too painful, but patient--effort to
get quit of them. And so far as you have confidence in me at all,
trust me for this, that how many soever you may find or fancy your
faults to be, there are only two that are of real consequence,--
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