| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen: Fanny began to hope there would be nothing worse
to be endured than a half-hour of moderate agitation.
But here she hoped too much; Miss Crawford was not the slave
of opportunity. She was determined to see Fanny alone,
and therefore said to her tolerably soon, in a low voice,
"I must speak to you for a few minutes somewhere";
words that Fanny felt all over her, in all her pulses
and all her nerves. Denial was impossible. Her habits
of ready submission, on the contrary, made her almost
instantly rise and lead the way out of the room.
She did it with wretched feelings, but it was inevitable.
Mansfield Park |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: I would have smiled at my absurdity if all, even the most intimate,
vestige of gaiety had not been crushed out of my heart by the
intolerable weight of my love for Rita. It crushed, it
overshadowed, too, it was immense. If there were any smiles in the
world (which I didn't believe) I could not have seen them. Love
for Rita . . . if it was love, I asked myself despairingly, while I
brushed my hair before a glass. It did not seem to have any sort
of beginning as far as I could remember. A thing the origin of
which you cannot trace cannot be seriously considered. It is an
illusion. Or perhaps mine was a physical state, some sort of
disease akin to melancholia which is a form of insanity? The only
The Arrow of Gold |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Options by O. Henry: a grumbling advance on a story that the Sunday editor had reluctantly
accepted. So if I was not feeling at peace with the world, at least
an armistice had been declared; and I was beginning with ardor to
write a description of the Brooklyn Bridge by moonlight.
"Well, Tripp," said I, looking up at him rather impatiently, "how goes
it?" He was looking to-day more miserable, more cringing and haggard
and downtrodden than I had ever seen him. He was at that stage of
misery where he drew your pity so fully that you longed to kick him.
"Have you got a dollar?" asked Tripp, with his most fawning look and
his dog-like eyes that blinked in the narrow space between his high-
growing matted beard and his low-growing matted hair.
Options |
