| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: Lockhart thresh; a week earlier or a week later, and there would
have been no story to write.
It was on Thursday and they were to leave on Saturday. Wyllis
and his sister were sitting on the wide piazza of the ranchhouse,
staring out into the afternoon sunlight and protesting against the
gusts of hot wind that blew up from the sandy riverbottom twenty
miles to the southward.
The young man pulled his cap lower over his eyes and remarked:
"This wind is the real thing; you don't strike it anywhere
else. You remember we had a touch of it in Algiers and I told you
it came from Kansas. It's the keynote of this country."
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: Well, then, I said, I will take away the words 'that I know.'
Nay, take nothing away; I desire no favours of you; but let me ask: Would
you be able to know all things, if you did not know all things?
Quite impossible.
And now, he said, you may add on whatever you like, for you confess that
you know all things.
I suppose that is true, I said, if my qualification implied in the words
'that I know' is not allowed to stand; and so I do know all things.
And have you not admitted that you always know all things with that which
you know, whether you make the addition of 'when you know them' or not? for
you have acknowledged that you have always and at once known all things,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: necessary expenses of your government, save for a war or a salary for
his own nephew.
ELIZABETH. Master Shakespear: you speak sooth; yet cannot I in any
wise mend it. I dare not offend my unruly Puritans by making so lewd
a place as the playhouse a public charge; and there be a thousand
things to be done in this London of mine before your poetry can have
its penny from the general purse. I tell thee, Master Will, it will
be three hundred years and more before my subjects learn that man
cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that cometh from the
mouth of those whom God inspires. By that time you and I will be dust
beneath the feet of the horses, if indeed there be any horses then,
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