| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: was silent. With all the phantoms of his heated, ignorant
fancy, Wolfe had not been vague in his ambitions. They were
practical, slowly built up before him out of his knowledge of
what he could do. Through years he had day by day made this
hope a real thing to himself,--a clear, projected figure of
himself, as he might become.
Able to speak, to know what was best, to raise these men and
women working at his side up with him: sometimes he forgot this
defined hope in the frantic anguish to escape, only to escape,--
out of the wet, the pain, the ashes, somewhere, anywhere,--only
for one moment of free air on a hill-side, to lie down and let
 Life in the Iron-Mills |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Options by O. Henry: staff, and strolled slowly into the thick woods that surrounded the
hermitage.
He had not long to wait. Up the faint pathway, slippery with its
carpet of pine-needles, toiled Beatrix, youngest and fairest of the
famous Trenholme sisters. She was all in blue from hat to canvas
pumps, varying in tint from the shade of the tinkle of a bluebell at
daybreak on a spring Saturday to the deep hue of a Monday morning at
nine when the washer-woman has failed to show up.
Beatrix dug her cerulean parasol deep into the pine-needles and
sighed. The hermit, on the q. t., removed a grass burr from the
ankle of one sandalled foot with the big toe of his other one.
 Options |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen: But here, one subject swallowed up all the rest.
Perhaps it must be so. The destination of the Thrush
must be now preeminently interesting. A day or two
might shew the difference. _She_ only was to blame.
Yet she thought it would not have been so at Mansfield.
No, in her uncle's house there would have been a
consideration of times and seasons, a regulation of subject,
a propriety, an attention towards everybody which there
was not here.
The only interruption which thoughts like these received
for nearly half an hour was from a sudden burst of her
 Mansfield Park |