| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Letters of Two Brides by Honore de Balzac: Yes, you are happy; you have had wisdom to obey the laws of social
life, whilst I stand outside, an alien.
Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the
loss of her beauty. I shall soon be thirty, and at that age the dirge
within begins. What though I am still beautiful, the limits of my
woman's reign are none the less in sight. When they are reached, what
then? I shall be forty before he is; I shall be old while he is still
young. When this thought goes to my heart, I lie at his feet for an
hour at a time, making him swear to tell me instantly if ever he feels
his love diminishing.
But he is a child. He swears, as though the mere suggestion were an
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: shoved her into her cell, next to Wolfe's, and shut the door.
Along the wall of her cell there was a crack low down by the
floor, through which she could see the light from Wolfe's. She
had discovered it days before. She hurried in now, and,
kneeling down by it, listened, hoping to hear some sound.
Nothing but the rasping of the tin on the bars. He was at his
old amusement again. Something in the noise jarred on her ear,
for she shivered as she heard it. Hugh rasped away at the bars.
A dull old bit of tin, not fit to cut korl with.
He looked out of the window again. People were leaving the
market now. A tall mulatto girl, following her mistress, her
Life in the Iron-Mills |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: and said slowly, `Good woman!' He made the sign of the cross
over me, put on his cap and went off in the dark. As we turned
back to the sitting-room, grandfather looked at me searchingly.
`The prayers of all good people are good,' he said quietly.
XIII
THE WEEK FOLLOWING Christmas brought in a thaw, and by New Year's Day
all the world about us was a broth of grey slush, and the guttered
slope between the windmill and the barn was running black water.
The soft black earth stood out in patches along the roadsides.
I resumed all my chores, carried in the cobs and wood and water,
and spent the afternoons at the barn, watching Jake shell corn
My Antonia |
