| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas: one's patrons."
"I hope to be captain without that," said Dantes.
"So much the better -- so much the better! Nothing will give
greater pleasure to all your old friends; and I know one
down there behind the Saint Nicolas citadel who will not be
sorry to hear it."
"Mercedes?" said the old man.
"Yes, my dear father, and with your permission, now I have
seen you, and know you are well and have all you require, I
will ask your consent to go and pay a visit to the
Catalans."
The Count of Monte Cristo |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: crouched up in the hollow of some old oak-tree, sharing his nuts
with the squirrels. They did not mind his being ugly, a bit. Why,
even the nightingale herself, who sang so sweetly in the orange
groves at night that sometimes the Moon leaned down to listen, was
not much to look at after all; and, besides, he had been kind to
them, and during that terribly bitter winter, when there were no
berries on the trees, and the ground was as hard as iron, and the
wolves had come down to the very gates of the city to look for
food, he had never once forgotten them, but had always given them
crumbs out of his little hunch of black bread, and divided with
them whatever poor breakfast he had.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Mother by Owen Wister: not sell his mother's unless they went to 110. 'In that case,' said he,
'it might be worth while to capitalise her premium.'"
"I liked the idea of capitalising one's premium. If you had fifty bonds
that cost you par, and sold them at 110, you would then buy at par
fifty-five bonds of some other rising kind, and go on doing this until--I
named no limit for this process; but my delighted mind saw visions of
eighty and a hundred thousand a year--comfort at least, if not affluence
in New York--and I explained to Ethel what the phrase capitalising one's
premium meant. I showed her the Petunias, too, and we read what it said
on the coupons aloud together. Ethel was at first not quite satisfied
with the arrangement of the coupons. 'Thirty dollars on January first,
|
