| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber: Not necessarily, or why should she have been hungry and out of a
job in January?
Jennie stood in the row before the window, and stared. The
longer she stared the sharper grew the lines that fright and
under-feeding had chiseled about her nose, and mouth, and eyes.
When your last meal is an eighteen-hour-old memory, and when that
memory has only near-coffee and a roll to dwell on, there is
something in the sight of January peaches and great strawberries
carelessly spilling out of a tipped box, just like they do in the
fruit picture on the dining-room wall, that is apt to carve sharp
lines in the corners of the face.
Buttered Side Down |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle: clearly and kindly that I was wrong and that Frank was right, and
that we should be putting ourselves in the wrong if we were so
secret. Then he offered to give us a chance of talking to Lord
St. Simon alone, and so we came right away round to his rooms at
once. Now, Robert, you have heard it all, and I am very sorry if
I have given you pain, and I hope that you do not think very
meanly of me."
Lord St. Simon had by no means relaxed his rigid attitude, but
had listened with a frowning brow and a compressed lip to this
long narrative.
"Excuse me," he said, "but it is not my custom to discuss my most
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: this would have been a heavy leathern strap; but, all over
the continent it is nothing but a piece of rope the size
of your little finger--clothes-line is what it is.
Cabs use it, private carriages, freight-carts and wagons,
all sorts of vehicles have it. In Munich I afterward saw
it used on a long wagon laden with fifty-four half-barrels
of beer; I had before noticed that the cabs in Heidelberg
used it--not new rope, but rope that had been in use
since Abraham's time --and I had felt nervous, sometimes,
behind it when the cab was tearing down a hill. But I
had long been accustomed to it now, and had even become
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