| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Europeans by Henry James: the figurative meaning which her companion appeared to attach to it.
But it gave her pleasure.
Felix had pushed back his chair and risen to his feet;
he slowly came toward her, smiling. "I am a sort of adventurer,"
he said, looking down at her.
She got up, meeting his smile. "An adventurer?" she repeated.
"I should like to hear your adventures."
For an instant she believed that he was going to take her hand;
but he dropped his own hands suddenly into the pockets of his
painting-jacket. "There is no reason why you should n't," he said.
"I have been an adventurer, but my adventures have been very innocent.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: at my father's paying so little attention to me and the rest of
those about him and being so absorbed in the thought of
Gúsef.
I willingly acknowledge that I was wrong in entertaining this
narrow-minded feeling. If I had entered fully into what my father
was feeling, I should have seen this at the time.
As far back as 1896, in consequence of the arrest of a doctor,
Miss N----, in Tula, my father wrote a long letter to Muravyof, the
Minister of Justice, in which he spoke of the "unreasonableness,
uselessness, and cruelty of the measures
¹The curious may be disposed to trace to some such
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Psychology of Revolution by Gustave le Bon: speeches, which were composed of cold and indefinite
abstractions. The Assembly contained orators who possessed an
immensely superior talent, such as Danton and the Girondists; yet
it was Robespierre who destroyed them.
We have really no acceptable explanation of the ascendancy which
the dictator finally obtained. Without influence in the National
Assembly, he gradually became the master of the Convention and of
the Jacobins. ``When he reached the Committee of Public Safety
he was already,'' said Billaud-Varennes, ``the most important
person in France.''
``His history,'' writes Michelet, ``is prodigious, far more
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