| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: hurries through his slumber as he does his life.
This man sums up all things--history, literature, politics,
government, religion, military science. Is he not a living
encyclopaedia, a grotesque Atlas; ceaselessly in motion, like Paris
itself, and knowing not repose? He is all legs. No physiognomy could
preserve its purity amid such toils. Perhaps the artisan who dies at
thirty, an old man, his stomach tanned by repeated doses of brandy,
will be held, according to certain leisured philosophers, to be
happier than the huckster is. The one perishes in a breath, and the
other by degrees. From his eight industries, from the labor of his
shoulders, his throat, his hands, from his wife and his business, the
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: is, and worms as we are, you have but to invest all this vileness with
a magical garment of words to transfigure us and uplift our souls til
earth flowers into a million heavens.
THE LADY. You spoil your heaven with your million. You are
extravagant. Observe some measure in your speech.
THE MAN. You speak now as Ben does.
THE LADY. And who, pray, is Ben?
THE MAN. A learned bricklayer who thinks that the sky is at the top
of his ladder, and so takes it on him to rebuke me for flying. I tell
you there is no word yet coined and no melody yet sung that is
extravagant and majestical enough for the glory that lovely words can
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley: prickly."
And Tom looked at himself: and he was all over prickles, just like
a sea-egg.
Which was quite natural; for you must know and believe that
people's souls make their bodies just as a snail makes its shell (I
am not joking, my little man; I am in serious, solemn earnest).
And therefore, when Tom's soul grew all prickly with naughty
tempers, his body could not help growing prickly, too, so that
nobody would cuddle him, or play with him, or even like to look at
him.
What could Tom do now but go away and hide in a corner and cry?
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