| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Macbeth by William Shakespeare: I would not be the Villaine that thou think'st,
For the whole Space that's in the Tyrants Graspe,
And the rich East to boot
Mal. Be not offended:
I speake not as in absolute feare of you:
I thinke our Country sinkes beneath the yoake,
It weepes, it bleeds, and each new day a gash
Is added to her wounds. I thinke withall,
There would be hands vplifted in my right:
And heere from gracious England haue I offer
Of goodly thousands. But for all this,
 Macbeth |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson: been her betrothed for more than a year, during which time she
had habitually seen him wooing every child he had met as if it
were a woman,--which, for Philip, was saying a great deal.
Happily they had in common the one trait of perfect amiability,
and she knew no more how to be jealous than he to be constant.
"Lili was easily won," he said. "Other things being equal,
people of six prefer that man who is tallest."
"Philip is not so very tall," said the eldest of the boys, who
was listening eagerly, and growing rapidly.
"No," said Philip, meekly. "But then the Pasteur was short,
and his brother was a dwarf."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: believe in a sudden and irresistible affinity; to have pictured, under
the promptings of transient excitement, a love-adventure in an age
when romances are written precisely because they never happen; to have
dreamed of balconies, guitars, stratagems, and bolts, enwrapped in
Almaviva's cloak; and, after inditing a poem in fancy, to stop at the
door of a house of ill-fame, and, crowning all, to discern in Rosina's
bashfulness a reticence imposed by the police--is not all this, I say,
an experience familiar to many a man who would not own it?
The most natural feelings are those we are least willing to confess,
and among them is fatuity. When the lesson is carried no further, the
Parisian profits by it, or forgets it, and no great harm is done. But
 Gambara |