The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: your least gestures. I knew that you were all graciousness, all
love, but I did not know how variously graceful you could be.
Everything combined to urge me to tender solicitation, to make me
ask the first kiss that a woman always refuses, no doubt that it
may be snatched from her. You, dear soul of my life, will never
guess beforehand what you may grant to my love, and will yield
perhaps without knowing it! You are utterly true, and obey your
heart alone.
"The sweet tones of your voice blended with the tender harmonies
that filled the quiet air, the cloudless sky. Not a bird piped,
not a breeze whispered--solitude, you, and I. The motionless
 Louis Lambert |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson: the route of Sir Daniel, and spying around for any signs that might
decide if he were right.
The streets were strewn with the dead and the wounded, whose fate,
in the bitter frost, was far the more pitiable. Gangs of the
victors went from house to house, pillaging and stabbing, and
sometimes singing together as they went.
From different quarters, as he rode on, the sounds of violence and
outrage came to young Shelton's ears; now the blows of the sledge-
hammer on some barricaded door, and now the miserable shrieks of
women.
Dick's heart had just been awakened. He had just seen the cruel
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: been for centuries a deep, dim reservoir of life. The life had
probably not been of the most vivid order: for long periods, no
doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into the past as the quiet
drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the green fish-pond
between the yews; but these back-waters of existence sometimes
breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion, and
Mary Boyne had felt from the first the occasional brush of an
intenser memory.
The feeling had never been stronger than on the December
afternoon when, waiting in the library for the belated lamps, she
rose from her seat and stood among the shadows of the hearth.
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