| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton: Ann Eliza hesitated, disconcerted by the unexpected question;
and the other, cocking her head on one side to study the effect of
the bow she had just sewed on the basket, continued: "We can't
afford more than thirty dollars a month, but the work is light.
She would be expected to do a little fancy sewing between times.
We want a bright girl: stylish, and pleasant manners. You know
what I mean. Not over thirty, anyhow; and nice-looking. Will you
write down the name?"
Ann Eliza looked at her confusedly. She opened her lips to
explain, and then, without speaking, turned toward the crisply-
curtained door.
|
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: enough all night -- with that patch-eyed Spanish devil
going for me all through 'em -- rot him!"
"No, not rot him. FIND him! Track the money!"
"Tom, we'll never find him. A feller don't have
only one chance for such a pile -- and that one's lost.
I'd feel mighty shaky if I was to see him, anyway."
"Well, so'd I; but I'd like to see him, anyway --
and track him out -- to his Number Two."
"Number Two -- yes, that's it. I been thinking
'bout that. But I can't make nothing out of it. What
do you reckon it is?"
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: In a crowd he was nearly always silent. Even for his classroom
he had no platitudes, no stock of professorial anecdotes.
When he was tired, his lectures were clouded, obscure, elliptical;
but when he was interested they were wonderful. I believe that Gaston
Cleric narrowly missed being a great poet, and I have sometimes thought
that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift.
He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.
How often I have seen him draw his dark brows together, fix his eyes
upon some object on the wall or a figure in the carpet, and then
flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his brain.
He could bring the drama of antique life before one out
My Antonia |
