| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: little on the last smiles of youth. Her nobler qualities dealt so many
wounds to her soul at the moment when the cold of the provinces seized
upon her. She would have died of grief like the ermine if by chance
she had been sullied by contact with those men whose thoughts are bent
on winning a few sous nightly at cards after a good dinner; pride
saved her from the shabby love intrigues of the provinces. A woman so
much above the level of those about her, forced to decide between the
emptiness of the men whom she meets and the emptiness of her own life,
can make but one choice; marriage and society became a cloister for
Anais. She lived by poetry as the Carmelite lives by religion. All the
famous foreign books published in France for the first time between
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Burning Daylight by Jack London: companies would have grown to such colossal proportions.
But he had got what he was after. He had played an exciting hand
and won, beating the steamship companies down into the dust and
mercilessly robbing the stockholders by perfectly legal methods
before he let go. Of course, in addition to the large sums of
money he had paid over, his allies had rewarded themselves by
gobbling the advantages which later enabled them to loot the
city. His alliance with a gang of cutthroats had brought about a
lot of cutthroating. But his conscience suffered no twinges. He
remembered what he had once heard an old preacher utter, namely,
that they who rose by the sword perished by the sword. One took
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Prince Otto by Robert Louis Stevenson: the Felsenburg? I have business there of an extreme importance.'
'I can refuse you nothing,' replied the old gentleman, gravely and
seriously enough. 'Whatever, madam, it is in my power to do for
you, that shall be done with pleasure. As soon as my chaise shall
overtake us, it is yours to carry you where you will. But,' added
he, reverting to his former manner, 'I observe you ask me nothing of
the Palace.'
'I do not care,' she said. 'I thought I saw it burning.'
'Prodigious!' said the Baronet. 'You thought? And can the loss of
forty toilettes leave you cold? Well, madam, I admire your
fortitude. And the state, too? As I left, the government was
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