| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake: Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
MY PRETTY ROSE TREE
A flower was offered to me,
Such a flower as May never bore;
But I said, 'I've a pretty rose tree,'
And I passed the sweet flower o'er.
 Songs of Innocence and Experience |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from 'Twixt Land & Sea by Joseph Conrad: drooping head. I stared at the heavy black coil of twisted hair.
It was enormous, crowning the bowed head with a crushing and
disdained glory. The escaped wisps hung straight down. And
suddenly I perceived that the girl was trembling from head to foot,
as though that glass of iced water had chilled her to the bone.
"What's the matter now?" I said, startled, but in no very
sympathetic mood.
She shook her bowed, overweighted head and cried in a stifled voice
but with a rising inflection:
"Go away! Go away! Go away!"
I got up then and approached her, with a strange sort of anxiety.
 'Twixt Land & Sea |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: working off a debt long since incurred.
This, no doubt, is true love, and includes every mode of loving; the
love of the heart and of the head--passion, caprice, and taste--to
accept Beyle's definitions. Didine loved him so wholly, that in
certain moments when her critical judgment, just by nature, and
constantly exercised since she had lived in Paris, compelled her to
read to the bottom of Lousteau's soul, sense was still too much for
reason, and suggested excuses.
"And what am I?" she replied. "A woman who has put herself outside the
pale. Since I have sacrificed all a woman's honor, why should you not
sacrifice to me some of a man's honor? Do we not live outside the
 The Muse of the Department |