| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Roads of Destiny by O. Henry: all your mishaps are traceable to that tiny star, the sooner we endow
our colleges with chairs of moral astronomy, the better.'
"'It isn't the size of the star that counts,' said Kearny; 'it's the
quality. Just the way it is with women. That's why they give the
biggest planets masculine names, and the little stars feminine ones--
to even things up when it comes to getting their work in. Suppose they
had called my star Agamemnon or Bill McCarty or something like that
instead of Phoebe. Every time one of those old boys touched their
calamity button and sent me down one of their wireless pieces of bad
luck, I could talk back and tell 'em what I thought of 'em in suitable
terms. But you can't address such remarks to a Phoebe.'
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: unconscious. We must beware, however, of trying to find between
that decay and that growth a bond of cause and effect where there is
really none. The general decay may have determined the course of
many men's thoughts; but it no more set them thinking than (as I
have heard said) the decay of the Ancien Regime produced the new
Regime--a loose metaphor, which, like all metaphors, will not hold
water, and must not be taken for a philosophic truth. That would be
to confess man--what I shall never confess him to be--the creature
of circumstances; it would be to fall into the same fallacy of
spontaneous generation as did the ancients, when they believed that
bees were bred from the carcass of a dead ox. In the first place,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Island Nights' Entertainments by Robert Louis Stevenson: and I couldn't remember where I was nor why I was in such pain nor
what I was all wetted with. Then it came back, and the first thing
I attended to was to give him the knife again a half-a-dozen times
up to the handle. I believe he was dead already, but it did him no
harm and did me good.
"I bet you're dead now," I said, and then I called to Uma.
Nothing answered, and I made a move to go and grope for her, fouled
my broken leg, and fainted again.
When I came to myself the second time the clouds had all cleared
away, except a few that sailed there, white as cotton. The moon
was up - a tropic moon. The moon at home turns a wood black, but
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