| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: horse. The child could only control the animal with his shrill little
voice, but the horse was afraid of Joby Toby.
" 'Well,' began Godefroid, 'what is the matter with you, my dear
fellow? You look gloomy and anxious; your gaiety is forced. You are
tormented by incomplete happiness. It is wretched, and that is a fact,
when one cannot marry the woman one loves at the mayor's office and
the church.'
" 'Have you courage to hear what I have to say? I wonder whether you
will see how much a man must be attached to a friend if he can be
guilty of such a breach of confidence as this for his sake.'
"Something in Rastignac's voice stung like a lash of a whip.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: Episodes in Pilot Life
IN the course of the tug-boat gossip, it came out that out
of every five of my former friends who had quitted the river,
four had chosen farming as an occupation. Of course this was not
because they were peculiarly gifted, agriculturally, and thus
more likely to succeed as farmers than in other industries:
the reason for their choice must be traced to some other source.
Doubtless they chose farming because that life is private
and secluded from irruptions of undesirable strangers--
like the pilot-house hermitage. And doubtless they also chose
it because on a thousand nights of black storm and danger
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving: snow, which, like a sheeted spectre, beset his very path! How
often did he shrink with curdling awe at the sound of his own
steps on the frosty crust beneath his feet; and dread to look
over his shoulder, lest he should behold some uncouth being
tramping close behind him! and how often was he thrown into
complete dismay by some rushing blast, howling among the trees,
in the idea that it was the Galloping Hessian on one of his
nightly scourings!
All these, however, were mere terrors of the night, phantoms
of the mind that walk in darkness; and though he had seen many
spectres in his time, and been more than once beset by Satan in
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow |
