| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Reef by Edith Wharton: seemed to simplify the incident, now turned out to be its
most galling complication. The bare truth, indeed, was that
he had hardly thought of her at all, either at the time or
since, and that he was ashamed to base his judgement of her
on his meagre memory of their adventure.
The essential cheapness of the whole affair--as far as his
share in it was concerned--came home to him with humiliating
distinctness. He would have liked to be able to feel that,
at the time at least, he had staked something more on it,
and had somehow, in the sequel, had a more palpable loss to
show. But the plain fact was that he hadn't spent a penny
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: his wife, who made herself gay and amusing to cheer him, who used the
resources of feminine genius to attract and seduce him to a love of
virtue, but whose ability and cleverness did not go so far as to
simulate love.
At this time all Paris was talking of the affair of a captain in the
army who in a paroxysm of libertine jealousy had killed a woman.
Diard, on coming home to dinner, told his wife that the officer was
dead. He had killed himself to avoid the dishonor of a trial and the
shame of death upon the scaffold. Juana did not see at first the logic
of such conduct, and her husband was obliged to explain to her the
fine jurisprudence of French law, which does not prosecute the dead.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: of the "stalwart hand."
The reader may be surprised at the impressions I had in some way conceived
of the social and material condition of the people at the North.
I had no proper idea of the wealth, refinement, enterprise,
and high civilization of this section of the country.
My "Columbian Orator," almost my only book, had done nothing
to enlighten me concerning Northern society. I had been taught
that slavery was the bottom fact of all wealth. With this foundation idea,
I came naturally to the conclusion that poverty must be the general
condition of the people of the free States. In the country from which I came,
a white man holding no slaves was usually an ignorant and poverty-stricken man,
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