| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau by Honore de Balzac: he works like a galley-slave, keep him down on his marrow-bones in the
dust. Are not they jealous, those fellows? Just the same in the
/article-Paris/! Finot wrote a superb comedy in one act for
Mademoiselle Mars, most glorious of the glorious!--ah, there's a woman
I love!--Well, in order to get it played he had to take it to the
Gaite. Andoche understands prospectuses, he worms himself into the
mercantile mind; and he's not proud, he'll concoct it for us gratis.
Damn it! with a bowl of punch and a few cakes we'll get it out of him;
for, Popinot, no nonsense! I am to travel on your commission without
pay: your competitors shall pay; I'll diddle it out of them. Let us
understand each other clearly. As for me, this triumph is an affair of
Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Emma by Jane Austen: "That's easily said, and easily felt by you, who have always
been your own master. You are the worst judge in the world,
Mr. Knightley, of the difficulties of dependence. You do not know
what it is to have tempers to manage."
"It is not to be conceived that a man of three or four-and-twenty
should not have liberty of mind or limb to that amount. He cannot
want money--he cannot want leisure. We know, on the contrary,
that he has so much of both, that he is glad to get rid of them at
the idlest haunts in the kingdom. We hear of him for ever at some
watering-place or other. A little while ago, he was at Weymouth.
This proves that he can leave the Churchills."
Emma |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: Pride stormed in her, but humiliation forced the cry from her
lips: "Aunt Julia, I shall be disgraced--I--" But she could go no
farther. If her aunt turned such a stony ear to the fiction of
the gambling debts, in what spirit would she receive the terrible
avowal of the truth?
"I consider that you ARE disgraced, Lily: disgraced by your
conduct far more than by its results. You say your friends have
persuaded you to play cards with them; well, they may as well
learn a lesson too. They can probably afford to lose a little
money--and at any rate, I am not going to waste any of mine in
paying them. And now I must ask you to leave me--this scene has
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