| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: 'That night, as I lay on a cushion in the tea-house that is in the
Street of Pomegranates, the guards of the Emperor entered and led
me to the palace. As I went in they closed each door behind me,
and put a chain across it. Inside was a great court with an arcade
running all round. The walls were of white alabaster, set here and
there with blue and green tiles. The pillars were of green marble,
and the pavement of a kind of peach-blossom marble. I had never
seen anything like it before.
'As I passed across the court two veiled women looked down from a
balcony and cursed me. The guards hastened on, and the butts of
the lances rang upon the polished floor. They opened a gate of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Hated Son by Honore de Balzac: king.
Such were the circumstances which preceded and accompanied the birth
of Etienne d'Herouville. If the count had no other reason for wishing
the death of this disowned son poor Etienne would still have been the
object of his aversion. In his eyes the misfortune of a rickety,
sickly constitution was a flagrant offence to his self-love as a
father. If he execrated handsome men, he also detested weakly ones, in
whom mental capacity took the place of physical strength. To please
him a man should be ugly in face, tall, robust, and ignorant. Etienne,
whose debility would bow him, as it were, to the sedentary occupations
of knowledge, was certain to find in his father a natural enemy. His
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells: aggressive and disagreeable; her next that she was a person of
amazing persuasive power. She was perhaps three-and-twenty, and
very pink and healthy-looking, showing a great deal of white and
rounded neck above her business-like but altogether feminine
blouse, and a good deal of plump, gesticulating forearm out of
her short sleeve. She had animated dark blue-gray eyes under her
fine eyebrows, and dark brown hair that rolled back simply and
effectively from her broad low forehead. And she was about as
capable of intelligent argument as a runaway steam-roller. She
was a trained being--trained by an implacable mother to one end.
She spoke with fluent enthusiasm. She did not so much deal with
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