| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Albert Savarus by Honore de Balzac: "Everybody thought you were done for."
"And we should have been, but for me. I told our advocate to be off to
Paris, and at the crucial moment I was able to secure a new pleader,
to whom we owe our victory, a wonderful man--"
"At Besancon?" said Monsieur de Watteville, guilelessly.
"At Besancon," replied the Abbe de Grancey.
"Oh yes, Savaron," said a handsome young man sitting near the
Baroness, and named de Soulas.
"He spent five or six nights over it; he devoured documents and
briefs; he had seven or eight interviews of several hours with me,"
continued Monsieur de Grancey, who had just reappeared at the Hotel de
Albert Savarus |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Confidence by Henry James: This course would have had the drawback of not enabling him to
measure the operation of so ingenious a policy, and Bernard liked,
of all the things in the world, to know when he was successful.
He believed, at all events, that he was successful now, and that the virtue
of his conversation itself had persuaded this keen and brilliant
girl that he was thinking of anything in the world but herself.
He flattered himself that the civil indifference of his manner,
the abstract character of the topics he selected, the irrelevancy of
his allusions and the laxity of his attention, all contributed to this
result.
Such a result was certainly a remarkable one, for it is almost superfluous
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: In truth all that night had been the abomination of desolation to
me. After wrestling with my thoughts, if the acute consciousness
of a woman's existence may be called a thought, I had apparently
dropped off to sleep only to go on wrestling with a nightmare, a
senseless and terrifying dream of being in bonds which, even after
waking, made me feel powerless in all my limbs. I lay still,
suffering acutely from a renewed sense of existence, unable to lift
an arm, and wondering why I was not at sea, how long I had slept,
how long Therese had been talking before her voice had reached me
in that purgatory of hopeless longing and unanswerable questions to
which I was condemned.
The Arrow of Gold |
