| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: are they? What's the matter with him? What has she done?/ They lowered
their voices and walked away in order to talk more at their ease on
some retired couch. Never was a more promising mine laid open to
seekers after mysteries. No one knew from what country the Lanty
family came, nor to what source--commerce, extortion, piracy, or
inheritance--they owed a fortune estimated at several millions. All
the members of the family spoke Italian, French, Spanish, English, and
German, with sufficient fluency to lead one to suppose that they had
lived long among those different peoples. Were they gypsies? were they
buccaneers?
"Suppose they're the devil himself," said divers young politicians,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: of them under umbrellas; women did their washing; and every barge
boasted its mongrel cur by way of watch-dog. Each one barked
furiously at the canoes, running alongside until he had got to the
end of his own ship, and so passing on the word to the dog aboard
the next. We must have seen something like a hundred of these
embarkations in the course of that day's paddle, ranged one after
another like the houses in a street; and from not one of them were
we disappointed of this accompaniment. It was like visiting a
menagerie, the CIGARETTE remarked.
These little cities by the canal side had a very odd effect upon
the mind. They seemed, with their flower-pots and smoking
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Fisherman's Luck by Henry van Dyke: But the piperlings could not fly, having no feathers; and they crept
under a crooked log. I rolled the log over very gently and took one
of the cowering creatures into my hand--a tiny, palpitating scrap of
life, covered with soft gray down, and peeping shrilly, like a
Liliputian chicken. And now the mother was transformed. Her fear
was changed into fury. She was a bully, a fighter, an Amazon in
feathers. She flew at me with loud cries, dashing herself almost
into my face. I was a tyrant, a robber, a kidnapper, and she called
heaven to witness that she would never give up her offspring without
a struggle. Then she changed her tactics and appealed to my baser
passions. She fell to the ground and fluttered around me as if her
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