| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that
soon. You must live within yourself, and depend upon
yourself always tucked up and ready for a start, and not
have many affairs. A man may grow rich in Turkey even, if
he will be in all respects a good subject of the Turkish
government. Confucius said: "If a state is governed by the
principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of
shame; if a state is not governed by the principles of
reason, riches and honors are subjects of shame." No: until
I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me
in some distant Southern port, where my liberty is
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: make Mr Ramsay move on. There he stood, demanding sympathy.
Mrs Ramsay, who had been sitting loosely, folding her son in her arm,
braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort,
and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of
spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies
were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she
sat, taking up her stocking again), and into this delicious fecundity,
this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged
itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare. He wanted sympathy. He
was a failure, he said. Mrs Ramsay flashed her needles. Mr Ramsay
repeated, never taking his eyes from her face, that he was a failure.
To the Lighthouse |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from King Henry VI by William Shakespeare: SCENE VIII. London. The Palace.
[Flourish. Enter KING HENRY, WARWICK, CLARENCE, MONTAGUE,
EXETER, and OXFORD.]
WARWICK.
What counsel, lords? Edward from Belgia,
With hasty Germans and blunt Hollanders,
Hath pass'd in safety through the narrow seas,
And with his troops doth march amain to London;
And many giddy people flock to him.
KING HENRY.
Let's levy men and beat him back again.
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