| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela: muscles a freedom welcome after their tight confinement
in the slippers. She said:
"Hey, you, Pancracio, go and get me my blue stock-
ings . . . they're with the rest of my plunder."
Soldiers and their friends, companions and veterans of
other campaigns, began to enter in groups of twos and
threes. Demetrio, growing excited, began to narrate in
detail his most notable feats of arms.
"What the hell is that noise?" he asked in surprise as
he heard string and brass instruments tuning up in the
patio.
 The Underdogs |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: It annoyed her, this phrase-making, and she said to him, in a matter-
of-fact way, that it was a perfectly lovely evening. And what was he
groaning about, she asked, half laughing, half complaining, for she
guessed what he was thinking--he would have written better books if he
had not married.
He was not complaining, he said. She knew that he did not complain.
She knew that he had nothing whatever to complain of. And he seized
her hand and raised it to his lips and kissed it with an intensity that
brought the tears to her eyes, and quickly he dropped it.
They turned away from the view and began to walk up the path where the
silver-green spear-like plants grew, arm in arm. His arm was almost
 To the Lighthouse |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: agent with the gift of a modest little house in the rue Royale. The
poor toiler had brought back from New York, together with his cottons,
a pretty little wife, attracted it would seem by his French nature.
Miss Grummer was worth about four thousand dollars (twenty thousand
francs), which sum Dumay placed with his colonel, to whom he now
became an alter ego. In a short time he learned to keep his patron's
books, a science which, to use his own expression, pertains to the
sergeant-majors of commerce. The simple-hearted soldier, whom fortune
had forgotten for twenty years, thought himself the happiest man in
the world as the owner of the little house (which his master's
liberality had furnished), with twelve hundred francs a year from
 Modeste Mignon |