| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Poems by T. S. Eliot: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: shoulders; the gesture was meant to say that she was nothing if
not capricious, and that a lover must take her as she
was.--"Besides," she added, "what is that to you? You shall
be my escort."
"That would be difficult tonight," he objected; "I am not
properly dressed."
"It seems to me," she returned loftily, "that if anyone has a
right to complain of your costume, it is I. Know, therefore,
monsieur le voyageur, that if I accept a man's arm, he is
forthwith above the laws of fashion, nobody would venture to
criticise him. You do not know the world, I see; I like you the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: empire. He was conscious how inadequate one man was to bear the
weight of that Titan and too vast orb. What I mean by a perfect
man is one who develops under perfect conditions; one who is not
wounded, or worried or maimed, or in danger. Most personalities
have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been
wasted in friction. Byron's personality, for instance, was
terribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy,
and Philistinism of the English. Such battles do not always
intensify strength: they often exaggerate weakness. Byron was
never able to give us what he might have given us. Shelley escaped
better. Like Byron, he got out of England as soon as possible.
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