| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Man of Business by Honore de Balzac: elderly lover, that no rival could have guessed anything from his
behavior in the reading-room. For a couple of months Croizeau watched
the retired custom-house official; but before the third month was out
he had good reason to believe that his suspicions were groundless. He
exerted his ingenuity to scrape an acquaintance with Denisart, came up
with him in the street, and at length seized his opportunity to
remark, 'It is a fine day, sir!'
"Whereupon the retired official responded with, 'Austerlitz weather,
sir. I was there myself--I was wounded indeed, I won my Cross on that
glorious day.'
"And so from one thing to another the two drifted wrecks of the Empire
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from When a Man Marries by Mary Roberts Rinehart: over and trying to remember who Jezebel was, and toward morning I
distinctly heard the knob of the door turn. I mistrusted my ears,
however, and so I got up quietly and went over in the darkness.
There was no sound outside, but when I put my hand on the knob I
felt it move under my fingers. The counter pressure evidently
alarmed whoever it was, for the knob was released and nothing
more happened. But by this time anything so uncomplicated as the
fumbling of a knob at night had no power to disturb me. I went
back to bed.
Chapter XX. BREAKING OUT IN A NEW PLACE
Hunger roused everybody early the next morning, Friday. Leila
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Rescue by Joseph Conrad: always faithful --like the favourite daughter of a man's heart.
For hours he would stand elbow on rail, his head in his hand and
listen--and listen in dreamy stillness to the cajoling and
promising whisper of the sea, that slipped past in vanishing
bubbles along the smooth black-painted sides of his craft. What
passed in such moments of thoughtful solitude through the mind of
that child of generations of fishermen from the coast of Devon,
who like most of his class was dead to the subtle voices, and
blind to the mysterious aspects of the world--the man ready for
the obvious, no matter how startling, how terrible or menacing,
yet defenceless as a child before the shadowy impulses of his own
The Rescue |
