| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: take advantage of some fleeting opportunity, to get a man hanged or
set him free. They infect their horses, they overdrive and age and
break them, like their own legs, before their time. Time is their
tyrant: it fails them, it escapes them; they can neither expand it nor
cut it short. What soul can remain great, pure, moral, and generous,
and, consequently, what face retain its beauty in this depraving
practice of a calling which compels one to bear the weight of the
public sorrows, to analyze them, to weigh them, estimate them, and
mark them out by rule? Where do these folk put aside their
hearts? . . . I do not know; but they leave them somewhere or other,
when they have any, before they descend each morning into the abyss of
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy: a finer flame now that she was gone -- that was all.
His incipient friendship with her aunt-had been
nipped by the failure of his suit, and all that Oak learnt
of Bathsheba's movements was done indirectly. It ap-
peared that she had gone to a place called Weatherbury,
more than twenty miles off, but in what capacity --
whether as a visitor, or permanently, he could not
discover.
Gabriel had two dogs. George, the elder, exhibited
an ebony-tipped nose, surrounded by a narrow margin
of pink flesh, and a coat marked in random splotches
Far From the Madding Crowd |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Just Folks by Edgar A. Guest: And I fell to eating largely, for I could not be denied--
Oh, I'm sure a king would relish the sausage mother fried.
Times have changed and so have breakfasts; now each morning when I see
A dish of shredded something or of flakes passed up to me,
All my thoughts go back to boyhood, to the days of long ago,
When the morning meal meant something more than vain and idle show.
And I hunger, Oh, I hunger, in a way I cannot hide,
For a plate of steaming sausage like the kind my mother fried.
Friends
Ain't it fine when things are going
Topsy-turvy and askew
Just Folks |
