| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: to do such things. But it was nothing to the scene that followed.
Crazy Mary darted out from the group of women at the church door,
and ran down the road after Lena, shouting horrible threats.
`Look out, you Lena Lingard, look out! I'll come over with
a corn-knife one day and trim some of that shape off you.
Then you won't sail round so fine, making eyes at the men!...'
The Norwegian women didn't know where to look. They were
formal housewives, most of them, with a severe sense of decorum.
But Lena Lingard only laughed her lazy, good-natured laugh and rode on,
gazing back over her shoulder at Ole's infuriated wife.
The time came, however, when Lena didn't laugh. More than once Crazy Mary
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: exhausted the tale of lawsuits, they recapitulated the sum total of
their most profitable stock-takings, and told each other old stories
of the Saint-Denis quarter. At two o'clock old Guillaume went to cast
an eye on the business at the Cat and Racket; on his way back he
called at all the shops, formerly the rivals of his own, where the
young proprietors hoped to inveigle the old draper into some risky
discount, which, as was his wont, he never refused point-blank. Two
good Normandy horses were dying of their own fat in the stables of the
big house; Madame Guillaume never used them but to drag her on Sundays
to high Mass at the parish church. Three times a week the worthy
couple kept open house. By the influence of his son-in-law
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde: And the damned grotesques made arabesques,
Like the wind upon the sand!
With the pirouettes of marionettes,
They tripped on pointed tread:
But with flutes of Fear they filled the ear,
As their grisly masque they led,
And loud they sang, and long they sang,
For they sang to wake the dead.
'Oho!' they cried, 'The world is wide,
But fettered limbs go lame!
And once, or twice, to throw the dice
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