| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: the postmark, as it were, of Oxford, and as soon as he opened his
mouth I perceived, in addition to a remarkable revelation of gums,
that the text of the queer communication matched the registered
envelope. He was full of refinements and angles, of dreary and
distinguished knowledge. Of his unconscious drollery his dress
freely partook; it seemed, from the gold ring into which his red
necktie was passed to the square toe-caps of his boots, to conform
with a high sense of modernness to the fashion before the last.
There were moments when his overdone urbanity, all suggestive
stammers and interrogative quavers, made him scarcely intelligible;
but I felt him to be a gentleman and I liked the honesty of his
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain: had always looked upon as infallible. If you buried
a marble with certain necessary incantations, and
left it alone a fortnight, and then opened the place
with the incantation he had just used, you would find
that all the marbles you had ever lost had gathered
themselves together there, meantime, no matter how
widely they had been separated. But now, this thing
had actually and unquestionably failed. Tom's whole
structure of faith was shaken to its foundations. He
had many a time heard of this thing succeeding but
never of its failing before. It did not occur to him
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson: and looked back, I saw all the open part of the hill below me.
The lawyer and the sheriff's officer were standing just above the
road, crying and waving on me to come back; and on their left,
the red-coats, musket in hand, were beginning to struggle singly
out of the lower wood.
"Why should I come back?" I cried. "Come you on!"
"Ten pounds if ye take that lad!" cried the lawyer. "He's an
accomplice. He was posted here to hold us in talk."
At that word (which I could hear quite plainly, though it was to
the soldiers and not to me that he was crying it) my heart came
in my mouth with quite a new kind of terror. Indeed, it is one
Kidnapped |
