| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Beauty and The Beast by Bayard Taylor: first glance rested on the brother's hands, clasping; then, looking
from one to the other, she saw that the cheeks of both were wet.
"Now, leave me," she said, "but come to-morrow, Jonathan!" Even
then she turned from one to the other, with a painful, touching
uncertainty, and stretched out both hands to them in farewell.
How that poor twin heart struggled with itself is only known to
God. All human voices, and as they believed, also the Divine
Voice, commanded the division of their interwoven life. Submission
would have seemed easier, could they have taken up equal and
similar burdens; but David was unable to deny that his pack was
overweighted. For the first time, their thoughts began to diverge.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: clamour aloud for my attention. They came with a silent and
irresistible appeal--and the appeal, I affirm here, was not to my
self-love or my vanity. It seems now to have had a moral
character, for why should the memory of these beings, seen in
their obscure, sun-bathed existence, demand to express itself in
the shape of a novel, except on the ground of that mysterious
fellowship which unites in a community of hopes and fears all the
dwellers on this earth?
I did not receive my visitors with boisterous rapture as the
bearers of any gifts of profit or fame. There was no vision of a
printed book before me as I sat writing at that table, situated
A Personal Record |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Wheels of Chance by H. G. Wells: bound to admit. "Good-night, Sis," he said, "and pleasant dreams.
I'll just 'ave a look at this paper before I turn in." But this
was living indeed! he told himself.
So gallantly did Mr. Hoopdriver comport himself up to the very
edge of the Most Wonderful Day of all. It had begun early, you
will remember, with a vigil in a little sweetstuff shop next door
to the Angel at Midhurst. But to think of all the things that had
happened since then! He caught himself in the middle of a yawn,
pulled out his watch, saw the time was halfpast eleven, and
marched off, with a fine sense of heroism, bedward.
THE SURBITON INTERLUDE
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