| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey: to send Fay back to any Gentile family that would take her in.
Passionately and reproachfully and wonderingly Jane had refused
even to entertain such an idea. And now Lassiter never advised it
again, grew sadder and quieter in his contemplation of the child,
and infinitely more gentle and loving. Sometimes Jane had a cold,
inexplicable sensation of dread when she saw Lassiter watching
Fay. What did the rider see in the future? Why did he, day by
day, grow more silent, calmer, cooler, yet sadder in prophetic
assurance of something to be?
No doubt, Jane thought, the rider, in his almost superhuman power
of foresight, saw behind the horizon the dark, lengthening
Riders of the Purple Sage |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: conversation--but not daring to confess it, would sometimes turn with
ingratiating hints to the old priest.
"Monsieur le Cure is dying for his game," they would say.
The wily priest lent himself very readily to the little trick. He
protested.
"We should lose too much by ceasing to listen to our inspired
hostess!" and so he would incite Dinah's magnanimity to take pity at
last on her dear Abbe.
This bold manoeuvre, a device of the Sous-prefet's, was repeated with
so much skill that Dinah never suspected her slaves of escaping to the
prison yard, so to speak, of the cardtable; and they would leave her
The Muse of the Department |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: With a quick rattle of blocks and one single silky swish, the
sail is filled by a little breeze keen enough to have come
straight down from the frozen moon, and the boat, after the
clatter of the hauled-in sweeps, seems to stand at rest,
surrounded by a mysterious whispering so faint and unearthly that
it may be the rustling of the brilliant, overpowering moon rays
breaking like a rain-shower upon the hard, smooth, shadowless
sea.
I may well remember that last night spent with the pilots of the
Third Company. I have known the spell of moonlight since, on
various seas and coasts--coasts of forests, of rocks, of sand
A Personal Record |
