| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: "Gahan of Gathol has asked permission to woo you."
The girl sat up very straight and tilted her chin in the air. "I
would not wed with a walking diamond-mine," she said. "I will not
have him."
"I told him as much," replied her father, "and that you were as
good as betrothed to another. He was very courteous about it; but
at the same time he gave me to understand that he was accustomed
to getting what he wanted and that he wanted you very much. I
suppose it will mean another war. Your mother's beauty kept
Helium at war for many years, and--well, Tara of Helium, if I
were a young man I should doubtless be willing to set all Barsoom
The Chessmen of Mars |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: because those present feel a need of enlivening the journey and
forgetting its tedium.
That is how things happen in French stage-coaches. In other countries
customs are very different. Englishmen pique themselves on never
opening their lips; Germans are melancholy in a vehicle; Italians too
wary to talk; Spaniards have no public conveyances; and Russians no
roads. There is no amusement except in the lumbering diligences of
France, that gabbling and indiscreet country, where every one is in a
hurry to laugh and show his wit, and where jest and epigram enliven
all things, even the poverty of the lower classes and the weightier
cares of the solid bourgeois. In a coach there is no police to check
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Maid Marian by Thomas Love Peacock: by which one promise to pay is satisfactorily paid with another
promise to pay, and that again with another in infinite series,
they would not, as their wiser posterity has done,
take those tenders for true pay which were not sterling;
so that, one fine morning, the knight found himself sitting
on a pleasant bank of the Trent, with only a solitary squire,
who still clung to the shadow of preferment, because he did
not see at the moment any better chance of the substance.
The knight did not despair because of the desertion of his followers:
he was well aware that he could easily raise recruits if he could
once find trace of his game; he, therefore, rode about indefatigably
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