| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Damaged Goods by Upton Sinclair: not bring himself to face the ordeal--he was ashamed to admit to
a doctor that he had laid himself open to such a taint.
He began to lose the radiant expression from his round and rosy
face. He had less appetite, and his moods of depression became
so frequent that he could not hide then even from Henriette. She
asked him once or twice if there were not something the matter
with him, and he laughed--a forced and hurried laugh--and told
her that he had sat up too late the night before, worrying over
the matter of his examinations. Oh, what a cruel thing it was
that a man who stood in the very gateway of such a garden of
delight should be tormented and made miserable by this loathsome
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Under the Andes by Rex Stout: suspicious of us; often, when he thought himself unobserved, I
caught him eyeing us askance with something nearly approaching
terror.
We journeyed southward for eleven days; on the morning of the
twelfth we saw below us our goal. Six hours later we had entered
the same street of Cerro de Pasco through which we had passed
formerly with light hearts; and the heart which had been gayest of
all we had left behind us, stilled forever, somewhere beneath the
mountain of stone which she had herself chosen for her tomb.
Almost the first person we saw was none other than Felipe, the
arriero. He sat on the steps of the hotel portico as we
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: continue to walk, in a divine self-pity, the aisles of the
forgotten graveyard. The length of man's life, which is endless to
the brave and busy, is scorned by his ambitious thought. He cannot
bear to have come for so little, and to go again so wholly. He
cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be still idle, and
by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do. The parable
of the talent is the brief epitome of youth. To believe in
immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in
life. Denunciatory preachers seem not to suspect that they may be
taken gravely and in evil part; that young men may come to think of
time as of a moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the
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