| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Deputy of Arcis by Honore de Balzac: pompously.
"Oh, pardon me, monsieur," he replied, snatching it off; "I forgot
myself."
Then he slipped into the thickest of the crowd and disappeared.
A few seconds after the irruption of this youth the same door gave
access to a man around whose powerful, seamed face was the collar of a
white beard, which, combined with a thick shock of hair, also white
but slightly reddish in tone and falling almost to his shoulders, gave
him very much the air of an old Conventional, or a Bernardin de Saint-
Pierre who had had the small-pox. His face and his hair placed him in
the sixties, but his robust figure, the energetic decision of his
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: when, in the part called the Pool, just below London Bridge, the
vessels moored stem and stern in the very strength of the tide
formed one solid mass like an island covered with a forest of
gaunt, leafless trees; and when the trade had grown too big for the
river there came the St. Katherine's Docks and the London Docks,
magnificent undertakings answering to the need of their time. The
same may be said of the other artificial lakes full of ships that
go in and out upon this high road to all parts of the world. The
labour of the imperial waterway goes on from generation to
generation, goes on day and night. Nothing ever arrests its
sleepless industry but the coming of a heavy fog, which clothes the
The Mirror of the Sea |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: 'her own sort.' She doesn't deny that he's good, but she finds him
impossibly ridiculous. He's quite the last person she would ever
dream of." I was almost disposed on hearing this to protest that
if the girl had so little proper feeling her noble suitor had
perhaps served her right; but after a while my curiosity as to just
how her noble suitor HAD served her got the better of that emotion,
and I asked a question or two which led my companion again to apply
to him the invidious term I have already quoted. What had happened
was simply that Flora had at the eleventh hour broken down in the
attempt to put him off with an uncandid account of her infirmity
and that his lordship's interest in her had not been proof against
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