| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy: middle life; and the eyes, though keen, permeated rather than
penetrated: what they had lost of their boy-time brightness by a
dozen years of hard reading lending a quietness to their gaze
which suited them well.
A lady would have said there was a smell of tobacco in the room: a
man that there was not.
Knight did not rise. He looked at a timepiece on the mantelshelf,
then turned again to his letters, pointing to a chair.
'Well, I am glad you have come. I only returned to town
yesterday; now, don't speak, Stephen, for ten minutes; I have just
that time to the late post. At the eleventh minute, I'm your man.'
A Pair of Blue Eyes |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson: To mount where more of him shall yet be given,
Bereft of all retreat,
To sevenfold heat, --
As on a day when three in Dura shared
The furnace, and were spared
For glory by that king of Babylon
Who made himself so great that God, who heard,
Covered him with long feathers, like a bird.
Again, he may have gone down easily,
By comfortable altitudes, and found,
As always, underneath him solid ground
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Purse by Honore de Balzac: they live by intrigue and gambling. But on looking at Adelaide, a
man so pure-minded as Schinner could not but believe in her
perfect innocence, and ascribe the incoherence of the furniture
to honorable causes.
"My dear," said the old lady to the young one, "I am cold; make a
little fire, and give me my shawl."
Adelaide went into a room next the drawing-room, where she no
doubt slept, and returned bringing her mother a cashmere shawl,
which when new must have been very costly; the pattern was
Indian; but it was old, faded and full of darns, and matched the
furniture. Madame Leseigneur wrapped herself in it very
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