| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Marriage Contract by Honore de Balzac: "You would go in vain; she is now in Paris. She probably arrived there
as you left."
"No doubt she had heard of the sale of my property and came to help
me. I have no complaint to make of life, Mathias. I am truly loved,--
as much as any man ever could be here below; beloved by two women who
outdo each other in devotion; they are even jealous of each other; the
daughter blames the mother for loving me too much, and the mother
reproaches the daughter for what she calls her dissipations. I may say
that this great affection has been my ruin. How could I fail to
satisfy even the slightest caprice of a loving wife? Impossible to
restrain myself! Neither could I accept any sacrifice on her part. We
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Youth by Joseph Conrad: admit it was time. He was sixty if a day; a little man,
with a broad, not very straight back, with bowed shoul-
ders and one leg more bandy than the other, he had that
queer twisted-about appearance you see so often in men
who work in the fields. He had a nut-cracker face--chin
and nose trying to come together over a sunken mouth--
and it was framed in iron-gray fluffy hair, that looked
like a chin strap of cotton-wool sprinkled with coal-dust.
And he had blue eyes in that old face of his, which were
amazingly like a boy's, with that candid expression some
quite common men preserve to the end of their days by
Youth |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: terrible shocks of experience. The enormous world had not missed
him; and his place therein was not void--society had simply
forgotten him. So long as he had moved among them, all he knew
for friends had performed their petty altruistic roles,--had
discharged their small human obligations,--had kept turned toward
him the least selfish side of their natures,--had made with him a
tolerably equitable exchange of ideas and of favors; and after
his disappearance from their midst, they had duly mourned for his
loss--to themselves! They had played out the final act in the
unimportant drama of his life: it was really asking too much to
demand a repetition ... Impossible to deceive himself as to the
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