| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: about him helplessly. He turned to the banker, the only one of
that black, uneasy, stoop-shouldered group who seemed enough of
an individual to be addressed.
"None of Mr. Merrick's brothers are here?" he asked uncertainly.
The man with the red heard for the first time stepped up and
joined the group. "No, they have not come yet; the family is
scattered. The body will be taken directly to the house." He
stooped and took hold of one of the handles of the coffin.
"Take the long hill road up, Thompson--it will be easier on
the horses," called the liveryman as the undertaker snapped the
door of the hearse and prepared to mount to the driver's seat.
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from One Basket by Edna Ferber: four times since her marriage. She went to a downtown hotel. It
was too late, she told herself, to look for a less expensive room
that night. When she had tidied herself she went out. The
things she did were the childish, aimless things that one does
who finds herself in possession of sudden liberty. She walked up
State Street, and stared in the windows; came back, turned into
Madison, passed a bright little shop in the window of which
taffy-white and gold-- was being wound endlessly and
fascinatingly about a double-jointed machine. She went in and
bought a sackful, and wandered on down the street, munching.
She had supper at one of those white-tiled sarcophagi that
One Basket |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving: Witchcraft," in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently
believed.
He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and
simple credulity. His appetite for the marvelous, and his powers
of digesting it, were equally extraordinary; and both had been
increased by his residence in this spell-bound region. No tale
was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow. It was
often his delight, after his school was dismissed in the
afternoon, to stretch himself on the rich bed of clover bordering
the little brook that whimpered by his school-house, and there
con over old Mather's direful tales, until the gathering dusk of
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow |
