| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield: something was boiling. There was a great lump of something bubbling in his
chest that he couldn't get rid of. When he coughed the sweat sprang out on
his head; his eyes bulged, his hands waved, and the great lump bubbled as a
potato knocks in a saucepan. But what was more awful than all was when he
didn't cough he sat against the pillow and never spoke or answered, or even
made as if he heard. Only he looked offended.
"It's not your poor old gran's doing it, my lovey," said old Ma Parker,
patting back the damp hair from his little scarlet ears. But Lennie moved
his head and edged away. Dreadfully offended with her he looked--and
solemn. He bent his head and looked at her sideways as though he couldn't
have believed it of his gran.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: Balafres, father and son, wounded and scarred in the same manner, lost
something of this type, but not the grace and affability by which, as
much as by their bravery, they won the hearts of the soldiery.
It is not useless to relate how the present Grand Master received his
wound; for it was healed by the heroic measures of a personage of our
drama,--by Ambroise Pare, the man we have already mentioned as under
obligations to Lecamus, syndic of the guild of furriers. At the siege
of Calais the duke had his face pierced through and through by a
lance, the point of which, after entering the cheek just below the
right eye, went through to the neck, below the left eye, and remained,
broken off, in the face. The duke lay dying in his tent in the midst
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: more or less dependent on what we see, we must set ourselves to hunt
out beautiful things with all the ardour and patience of a botanist
after a rye plant. Day by day we perfect ourselves in the art of
seeing nature more favourably. We learn to live with her, as people
learn to live with fretful or violent spouses: to dwell lovingly on
what is good, and shut our eyes against all that is bleak or
inharmonious. We learn, also, to come to each place in the right
spirit. The traveller, as Brantome quaintly tells us, 'FAIT DES
DISCOURS EN SOI POUR SOUTENIR EN CHEMIN'; and into these discourses
he weaves something out of all that he sees and suffers by the way;
they take their tone greatly from the varying character of the scene;
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