| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: dwindled away.
"Let's have our tea," she said, turning back from the window and
pulling down the blind. "It was a good meeting--didn't you think so,
Sally?" she let fall, casually, as she sat down at the table. Surely
Mrs. Seal must realize that Mary had been extraordinarily efficient?
"But we go at such a snail's pace," said Sally, shaking her head
impatiently.
At this Mary burst out laughing, and all her arrogance was dissipated.
"You can afford to laugh," said Sally, with another shake of her head,
"but I can't. I'm fifty-five, and I dare say I shall be in my grave by
the time we get it--if we ever do."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Bride of Lammermoor by Walter Scott: castle of as great a lord as Lord Ravenswood wad continue in a
bleeze, and him standing looking on wi' his ain very een? It's
aye right," continued Caleb, shaking off his ragged page, and
closing in to his Master, "to train up weans, as the wise man
says, in the way they should go, and, aboon a', to teach them
respect to their superiors."
"But all this while, Caleb, you have never told me what became
of the arms and powder," said Ravenswood.
"Why, as for the arms," said Caleb, "it was just like the
bairn's rhyme--
Some gaed east and some gaed west,
The Bride of Lammermoor |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: triumphantly from the yellow froth, broke into spring leaf, shot up
into summer growth, and with their mesh of roots bound together the
moist sand beneath them against the batterings of another April.
Here and there a cottonwood soon glittered among them, quivering in
the low current of air that, even on breathless days when the dust
hung like smoke above the wagon road, trembled along the face of
the water.
It was on such an island, in the third summer of its yellow
green, that we built our watch fire; not in the thicket of dancing
willow wands, but on the level terrace of fine sand which had been
added that spring; a little new bit of world, beautifully ridged
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
