| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: stood quite motionless for a moment against a picture of Queen Victoria
wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter; when all at once he realised that
it was this: it was this:--she was the most beautiful person he had ever
seen.
With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild
violets--what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least; she had
eight children. Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her
breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in
her eyes and the wind in her hair--He had hold of her bag.
"Good-bye, Elsie," she said, and they walked up the street, she holding
her parasol erect and walking as if she expected to meet some one round
 To the Lighthouse |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Christ in Flanders by Honore de Balzac: Bishop, so far from thinking of the power of Holy Church, of his duty
to comfort Christians and exhort them to trust in God, mingled worldly
regrets and lover's sighs with the holy words of the breviary. By the
dim light that shone on the pale faces of the company, it was possible
to see their differing expressions as the boat was lifted high in air
by a wave, to be cast back into the dark depths; the shallop quivered
like a fragile leaf, the plaything of the north wind in the autumn;
the hull creaked, it seemed ready to go to pieces. Fearful shrieks
went up, followed by an awful silence.
There was a strange difference between the behavior of the folk in the
bows and that of the rich or great people at the other end of the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Egmont by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe: and longed for action.--Now I drag along, bound by the eyes of a maiden.
I cannot leave her! yet she, alas, cannot love me!--ah--no---she--she
cannot have entirely rejected me--not entirely--yet half love is no love!--I
will endure it no longer!--Can it be true what a friend lately whispered in
my ear, that she secretly admits a man into the house by night, when she
always sends me away modestly before evening? No, it cannot be true! It
is a lie! A base, slanderous lie! Clara is as innocent as I am wretched.--She
has rejected me, has thrust me from her heart--and shall I live on thus? I
cannot, I will not endure it. Already my native land is convulsed by
internal strife, and do I perish abjectly amid the tumult? I will not endure
it! When the trumpet sounds, when a shot falls, it thrills through my bone
 Egmont |