| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson: neglect, and I will be browbeat by no man living. My mind is quite
made up, and come what may, I will not depart from it a hair's breadth.
You and me are to sit here in company till her return: upon which,
without either word or look from you, she and I are to go forth again
to hold our talk. If she can satisfy me that she is willing to this
step, I will then make it; and if she cannot, I will not."
He leaped out of his chair like a man stung. "I can spy your
manoeuvre," he cried; "you would work upon her to refuse!"
"Maybe ay, and maybe no," said I. "That is the way it is to be,
whatever."
"And if I refuse?" cries he.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift: capricious kind of fate, destined to make other things clean, and
be nasty itself; at length, worn to the stumps in the service of
the maids, it is either thrown out of doors or condemned to the
last use - of kindling a fire. When I behold this I sighed, and
said within myself, "Surely mortal man is a broomstick!" Nature
sent him into the world strong and lusty, in a thriving condition,
wearing his own hair on his head, the proper branches of this
reasoning vegetable, till the axe of intemperance has lopped off
his green boughs, and left him a withered trunk; he then flies to
art, and puts on a periwig, valuing himself upon an unnatural
bundle of hairs, all covered with powder, that never grew on his
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: prosperity. Thus, all points of the circumference were fastened to the
centre and derived their life from it. The result was devotion and
confidence. Since 1789 the State, call it the Nation if you like, has
replaced the sovereign. Instead of looking directly to the chief
magistrate of this nation, the clerks have become, in spite of our
fine patriotic ideas, the subsidiaries of the government; their
superiors are blown about by the winds of a power called "the
administration," and do not know from day to day where they may be on
the morrow. As the routine of public business must go on, a certain
number of indispensable clerks are kept in their places, though they
hold these places on sufferance, anxious as they are to retain them.
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