| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: "Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is.
Near a score of miles from here. It is a place much
too good for you ever to have much to do with, poor boy,
I'm a-thinking."
"And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?"
"How can I tell?"
"Could I go to see him?"
"Lord, no! You didn't grow up hereabout, or you wouldn't ask such as that.
We've never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor folk in
Christminster with we."
Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be
 Jude the Obscure |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Call of the Canyon by Zane Grey: shade her eyes with her arm.
Again the strange, rapt glow suffused her body. Never in all her life had
she been so absolutely alone. She might as well have been in her grave. She
might have been dead to all earthy things and reveling in spirit in the
glory of the physical that had escaped her in life. And she abandoned
herself to this influence.
She loved these dry, dusty cinders; she loved the crater here hidden from
all save birds; she loved the desert, the earth-above all, the sun. She was
a product of the earth--a creation of the sun. She had been an
infinitesimal atom of inert something that had quickened to life under the
blazing magic of the sun. Soon her spirit would abandon her body and go on,
 The Call of the Canyon |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Yates Pride by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Eudora flushed a little. "I must be changed," she murmured.
"Not a bit. I would have known you anywhere. But I--"
"I knew you the minute you spoke."
"Did you?" he asked, eagerly. "I was afraid I had grown so stout
you would not remember me at all. Queer how a man will grow
stout. I am not such a big eater, either, and I have worked
hard, and--well, I might have been worse off, but I must say I
have seen men who seemed to me happier, though I have made the
best of things. I always did despise a flunk. But you! I heard
you had adopted a baby," he said, with a sudden glance at the
blue and white bundle in the carriage, "and I thought you were
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