| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: Say, I reckon your father's poor, and I'm bound to
say he's in pretty hard luck. Here, I'll put a twenty-
dollar gold piece on this board, and you get it when it
floats by. I feel mighty mean to leave you; but my
kingdom! it won't do to fool with small-pox, don't
you see?"
"Hold on, Parker," says the other man, "here's a
twenty to put on the board for me. Good-bye, boy;
you do as Mr. Parker told you, and you'll be all
right."
"That's so, my boy -- good-bye, good-bye. If you
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen: "Oh! I do not say so."
"I must say it, and say it with pleasure. Mrs. Norris
is much better fitted than my mother for having the charge
of you now. She is of a temper to do a great deal
for anybody she really interests herself about, and she
will force you to do justice to your natural powers."
Fanny sighed, and said, "I cannot see things as you do;
but I ought to believe you to be right rather than myself,
and I am very much obliged to you for trying to reconcile
me to what must be. If I could suppose my aunt really
to care for me, it would be delightful to feel myself
Mansfield Park |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: the scant phrases by which a man evades the vulgarest of
sentimental importunities. He had been a brute in spite of
himself, and sometimes, now that the remembrance of her face had
faded, and only her voice and words remained with him, he chafed
at his own inadequacy, his stupid inability to rise to the height
of her passion. His egoism was not of a kind to mirror its
complacency in the adventure. To have been loved by the most
brilliant woman of her day, and to have been incapable of loving
her, seemed to him, in looking back, the most derisive evidence of
his limitations; and his remorseful tenderness for her memory was
complicated with a sense of irritation against her for having
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