| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Cousin Betty by Honore de Balzac: Imperial festivities.
"Monsieur, virtue shines on it all. I have no wish to owe a handsome
abode to having made of the beauty you are pleased to ascribe to me a
/man-trap/ and /a money-box for five-franc pieces/!"
The captain bit his lips as he recognized the words he had used to
vilify Josepha's avarice.
"And for whom are you so magnanimous?" said he. By this time the
baroness had got her rejected admirer as far as the door.--"For a
libertine!" said he, with a lofty grimace of virtue and superior
wealth.
"If you are right, my constancy has some merit, monsieur. That is
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Three Taverns by Edwin Arlington Robinson: That earth has not a school where we may go
For wisdom, or for more than we may know.
Firelight
Ten years together without yet a cloud,
They seek each other's eyes at intervals
Of gratefulness to firelight and four walls
For love's obliteration of the crowd.
Serenely and perennially endowed
And bowered as few may be, their joy recalls
No snake, no sword; and over them there falls
The blessing of what neither says aloud.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: sense of his own dignity and respect for religion forbade his
taking upon himself a fictitious charge of adultery, and still
more suffering his wife, pardoned and beloved by him, to be
caught in the fact and put to public shame. Divorce appeared to
him impossible also on other still more weighty grounds.
What would become of his son in case of a divorce? To leave him
with his mother was out of the question. The divorced mother
would have her own illegitimate family, in which his position as
a stepson and his education would not be good. Keep him with him?
He knew that would be an act of vengeance on his part, and that
he did not want. But apart from this, what more than all made
Anna Karenina |
