| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain: CHAPTER 19
The Prophesy Realized
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a
good example.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
It were not best that we should all think alike; it is
difference of opinion that makes horse races.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
Dawson's Landing was comfortably finishing its season of
dull repose and waiting patiently for the duel.
Count Luigi was waiting, too; but not patiently, rumor said.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: (without any sexual feeling, she longed to cherish that loneliness), you
live for science (involuntarily, sections of potatoes rose before her
eyes); praise would be an insult to you; generous, pure-hearted, heroic
man! But simultaneously, she remembered how he had brought a valet all
the way up here; objected to dogs on chairs; would prose for hours (until
Mr Ramsay slammed out of the room) about salt in vegetables and the
iniquity of English cooks.
How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of
them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking
one felt or disliking? And to those words, what meaning attached, after
all? Standing now, apparently transfixed, by the pear tree, impressions
To the Lighthouse |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: orange with which he has to juggle, the third quality which
the prose writer must work into his pattern of words. It may
be thought perhaps that this is a quality of ease rather than
a fresh difficulty; but such is the inherently rhythmical
strain of the English language, that the bad writer - and
must I take for example that admired friend of my boyhood,
Captain Reid? - the inexperienced writer, as Dickens in his
earlier attempts to be impressive, and the jaded writer, as
any one may see for himself, all tend to fall at once into
the production of bad blank verse. And here it may be
pertinently asked, Why bad? And I suppose it might be enough
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