| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle: it made me mad, and I just on with my things and came right away
to you."
"Your father," said Holmes, "your stepfather, surely, since the
name is different."
"Yes, my stepfather. I call him father, though it sounds funny,
too, for he is only five years and two months older than myself."
"And your mother is alive?"
"Oh, yes, mother is alive and well. I wasn't best pleased, Mr.
Holmes, when she married again so soon after father's death, and
a man who was nearly fifteen years younger than herself. Father
was a plumber in the Tottenham Court Road, and he left a tidy
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back;
sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish
forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government;
with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds,
and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.
He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any
other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now
outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them;
but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so
forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully.
There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: Their eyes met with antagonism, and neither flinched.
"You had a perfect right to come here," Mary answered.
A loud knocking at the door interrupted them. Mary went to open it,
and returning with some note or parcel, Katharine looked away so that
Mary might not read her disappointment.
"Of course you had a right to come," Mary repeated, laying the note
upon the table.
"No," said Katharine. "Except that when one's desperate one has a sort
of right. I am desperate. How do I know what's happening to him now?
He may do anything. He may wander about the streets all night.
Anything may happen to him."
|
