| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Professor by Charlotte Bronte: must have disliked you. How did you excite their displeasure?"
"I don't know. I seldom spoke to them--they were nothing to me.
I considered them only as something to be glanced at from a
distance; their dresses and faces were often pleasing enough to
the eye: but I could not understand their conversation, nor even
read their countenances. When I caught snatches of what they
said, I could never make much of it; and the play of their lips
and eyes did not help me at all."
"That was your fault, not theirs. There are sensible, as well as
handsome women in X----; women it is worth any man's while to
talk to, and with whom I can talk with pleasure: but you had and
The Professor |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Octopus by Frank Norris: opening by turns. For upwards of three minutes he alternately
dozed and woke, his head and the whole upper half of his body
sagging abruptly sideways from moment to moment. But at length,
coming more to himself, he straightened up, ran his fingers
through his hair, and with a prodigious yawn, murmured vaguely:
"Oh, Lord! Oh-h, LORD!"
He stretched three or four times, twisting about in his place,
curling and uncurling his toes, muttering from time to time
between two yawns:
"Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!"
He stared about the room, collecting his thoughts, readjusting
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: figure which most attracted the public eye, and stirred up the
deepest feeling, was the Episcopal clergyman of King's Chapel,
riding haughtily among the magistrates in his priestly vestments,
the fitting representatives of prelacy and persecution, the union
of church and state, and all those abominations which had driven
the Puritans to the wilderness. Another guard of soldiers, in
double rank, brought up the rear.
The whole scene was a picture of the condition of New England,
and its moral, the deformity of any government that does not grow
out of the nature of things and the character of the people. On
one side the religious multitude, with their sad visages and dark
Twice Told Tales |
