| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: reluctance had, inexplicably, so overborne the intellectual
attraction, that the last years had been, to both of them, an
agony of conflicting impulses. Even now, if, in turning over old
papers, his hand lit on her letters, the touch filled him with
inarticulate misery. . . .
"She had so few intimate friends . . . that letters will be of
special value." So few intimate friends! For years she had had
but one; one who in the last years had requited her wonderful
pages, her tragic outpourings of love, humility, and pardon, with
the scant phrases by which a man evades the vulgarest of
sentimental importunities. He had been a brute in spite of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy: itself, and doubly so after the Capharnaum in which some of
her preceding years had been spent. As the lively and
sparkling emotions of her early married live cohered into an
equable serenity, the finer movements of her nature found
scope in discovering to the narrow-lived ones around her the
secret (as she had once learnt it) of making limited
opportunities endurable; which she deemed to consist in the
cunning enlargement, by a species of microscopic treatment,
of those minute forms of satisfaction that offer themselves
to everybody not in positive pain; which, thus handled, have
much of the same inspiring effect upon life as wider
The Mayor of Casterbridge |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: was thoroughly aroused. Eventually the blue-eyed one discovered,
nay, insisted, that I had a taste for cards (this was clumsily
worked in, but it was my fault, for in that I met him half-way
and allowed him no chance of good acting). Hereupon I laid my
head upon one side and simulated unholy wisdom, quoting odds and
ends of poker talk, all ludicrously misapplied. My friend kept
his countenance admirably, and well he might, for five minutes
later we arrived, always by the purest of chance, at a place
where we could play cards and also frivol with Louisiana State
Lottery tickets. Would I play?
"Nay," said I, "for to me cards have neither meaning nor
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