| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed by Edna Ferber: CHAPTER XXI
HAPPINESS
We laid Peter to rest in that noisy, careless, busy city
that he had loved so well, and I think his cynical lips
would have curled in a bitterly amused smile, and his
somber eyes would have flamed into sudden wrath if he
could have seen how utterly and completely New York had
forgotten Peter Orme. He had been buried alive ten years
before--and Newspaper Row has no faith in resurrections.
Peter Orme was not even a memory. Ten years is an age in
a city where epochs are counted by hours.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: the steps, Lving, flushed from his rapid exercise, stood still
and pondered a minute. He took off his skates, and overtook the
mother and daughter at the entrance of the gardens.
"Delighted to see you," said Princess Shtcherbatskaya. "On
Thursdays we are home, as always."
"Today, then?"
"We shall be pleased to see you," the princess said stiffly.
This stiffness hurt Kitty, and she could not resist the desire to
smooth over her mother's coldness. She turned her head, and with
a smile said:
"Good-bye till this evening."
Anna Karenina |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: he does not know; than which nothing, as I think, can be more irrational.
And yet, after finding us so easy and good-natured, the enquiry is still
unable to discover the truth; but mocks us to a degree, and has gone out of
its way to prove the inutility of that which we admitted only by a sort of
supposition and fiction to be the true definition of temperance or wisdom:
which result, as far as I am concerned, is not so much to be lamented, I
said. But for your sake, Charmides, I am very sorry--that you, having such
beauty and such wisdom and temperance of soul, should have no profit or
good in life from your wisdom and temperance. And still more am I grieved
about the charm which I learned with so much pain, and to so little profit,
from the Thracian, for the sake of a thing which is nothing worth. I think
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