| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan: his stare with a smile; what I had said might very well stand.
'Do you imagine,' he said, seeing that I did not mean to amplify it,
'that I want to marry her out of any sort of GOODness?'
'Benevolence is your weakness, Dacres.'
'I see. You think one's motive is to withdraw her from a relation
which ought to be the most natural in the world, but which is, in
her particular and painful case, the most equivocal.'
'Well, come,' I remonstrated. 'You have dropped one or two things,
you know, in the heat of your indignation, not badly calculated to
give one that idea. The eloquent statement you have just made, for
instance--it carries all the patness of old conviction. How often
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: woods. For three people all so old, so bulky in body, and
belonging to a race so venerable, they could not but surprise
us by their extreme and almost imbecile youthfulness of
spirit. They were only going to stay ten minutes at the Toll
House; had they not twenty long miles of road before them on
the other side? Stay to dinner? Not they! Put up the
horses? Never. Let us attach them to the verandah by a wisp
of straw rope, such as would not have held a person's hat on
that blustering day. And with all these protestations of
hurry, they proved irresponsible like children. Kelmar
himself, shrewd old Russian Jew, with a smirk that seemed
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: Mothers who lead a life like that of the Duchesse d'Uxelles keep their
children at a distance. I saw and knew nothing of the world until my
marriage. You can judge of my innocence! I knew nothing; I was
incapable of understanding the causes of my marriage. I had a fine
fortune; sixty thousand francs a year in forests, which the Revolution
overlooked (or had not been able to sell) in the Nivernais, with the
noble chateau of d'Anzy. Monsieur de Maufrigneuse was steeped in debt.
Later I learned what it was to have debts, but then I was too utterly
ignorant of life to suspect my position; the money saved out of my
fortune went to pacify my husband's creditors. Monsieur de
Maufrigneuse was forty-eight years of age when I married him; but
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