| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain: My brother and I were ten years old, and well educated for that age,
very studious, very fond of our books, and well grounded in the German,
French, Spanish, and English languages. Also, we were marvelous musical
prodigies--if you will allow me to say it, it being only the truth.
"Our father survived his misfortunes only a month, our mother soon
followed him, and we were alone in the world. Our parents could have
made themselves comfortable by exhibiting us as a show, and they had
many and large offers; but the thought revolted their pride,
and they said they would starve and die first. But what they
wouldn't consent to do, we had to do without the formality of consent.
We were seized for the debts occasioned by their illness and their funerals,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson: to a single white man. It is something to have been the hero
of it. And whatever other ingredients there were,
undoubtedly gratitude was present. As money value I have
actually gained on the transaction!
Your note arrived; little profit, I must say. Scott has
already put his nose in, in ST. IVES, sir; but his appearance
is not yet complete; nothing is in that romance, except the
story. I have to announce that I am off work, probably for
six months. I must own that I have overworked bitterly -
overworked - there, that's legible. My hand is a thing that
was, and in the meanwhile so are my brains. And here, in the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: "Hulking," insisted Daisy.
Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a
bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool
as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all
desire. They were here, and they accepted Tom and me, making only a
polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew
that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too
would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the
West, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its
close, in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer
nervous dread of the moment itself.
The Great Gatsby |
