| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dreams & Dust by Don Marquis: tide-walled city waits
The drumming thunders that announce brute
battle at her gates.
Southward a hundred windy leagues, through
storms that blind and bar,
Our cheated cruisers search the waves, our cap-
tains seek the war;
But here the port of peril is; the foeman's dread-
noughts ride
Sullen and black against the moon, upon a sullen
tide.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane: toward a goal. He had believed throughout that
it was a mere question of getting over an unpleas-
ant matter as quickly as possible, and he ran
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desperately, as if pursued for a murder. His
face was drawn hard and tight with the stress of
his endeavor. His eyes were fixed in a lurid
glare. And with his soiled and disordered dress,
his red and inflamed features surmounted by the
dingy rag with its spot of blood, his wildly
swinging rifle and banging accouterments, he
The Red Badge of Courage |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: chance explosion of the under side of man; and the most
masculine and direct of women will some day, to your dire
surprise, draw out like a telescope into successive lengths of
personation. Alas! for the man, knowing her to be at heart
more candid than himself, who shall flounder, panting, through
these mazes in the quest for truth. The proper qualities of
each sex are, indeed, eternally surprising to the other.
Between the Latin and the Teuton races there are similar
divergences, not to be bridged by the most liberal sympathy.
And in the good, plain, cut-and-dry explanations of this life,
which pass current among us as the wisdom of the elders, this
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