| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: half-closed, watching her play, and she was always conscious that
she was entertaining him. Sometimes he would take a copy of "Alice
in Wonderland" in his pocket, and no one could read it as he could,
laughing at her with his dark eyes, when anything amused him. No
one else could laugh so, with just their eyes, and without moving
a muscle of their face. Though he usually smiled at passages that
seemed not at all funny to the child, she always laughed gleefully,
because he was so seldom moved to mirth that any such demonstration
delighted her and she took the credit of it entirely to herself Her
own inclination had been for serious stories, with sad endings,
like the Little Mermaid, which he had once told her in an unguarded
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber: magazine or one of the kind with a French story in the back, it
will return to me. After each flight its feathers will be a little
more rumpled, its wings more weary, its course more wavering,
until, battered, spent, broken, it will flutter to rest in the
waste basket.
And yet, though its message may never be delivered, it must be
sent, because--well, because----
You know where the car turns at Eighteenth? There you see a
glaringly attractive billboard poster. It depicts groups of
smiling, white-clad men standing on tropical shores, with waving
palms overhead, and a glimpse of blue sea in the distance. The
Buttered Side Down |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: passed before I could become a doctor. I attended the public lectures,
but I no longer paid any attention to the professors, who, in my
opinion, were a set of dotards. I had already broken my idols--I
became a Parisian.
"To be brief, I led the aimless drifting life of a young, provincial
thrown into the heart of a great city; still retaining some good and
true feeling, still clinging more or less to the observance of certain
rules of conduct, still fighting in vain against the debasing
influence of evil examples, though I offered but a feeble, half-
hearted resistance, for the enemy had accomplices within me. Yes, sir,
my face is not misleading; past storms have plainly left their traces
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