| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: "Don't say that too often, my dear friend, or you will injure her,"
said the minister's wife, half-laughing.
Women never like to hear the praise of other women; they keep silence
themselves to lessen its effect.
"Poor La Billardiere is dying," remarked his Excellency the minister;
"that place falls to Rabourdin, one of our most able men, and to whom
our predecessors did not behave well, though one of them actually owed
his position in the prefecture of police under the Empire to a certain
great personage who was interested in Rabourdin. But, my dear friend,
you are still young enough to be loved by a pretty woman for
yourself--"
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne: But it was not. Listening more attentively, I heard in reality a
murmuring of voices. But my weakness prevented me from understanding
what the voices said. Yet it was language, I was sure of it.
For a moment I feared the words might be my own, brought back by the
echo. Perhaps I had been crying out unknown to myself. I closed my
lips firmly, and laid my ear against the wall again.
"Yes, truly, some one is speaking; those are words!"
Even a few feet from the wall I could hear distinctly. I succeeded in
catching uncertain, strange, undistinguishable words. They came as if
pronounced in low murmured whispers. The word '_forlorad_' was
several times repeated in a tone of sympathy and sorrow.
 Journey to the Center of the Earth |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw: In the first place, then, I desire to say that Mrs. Erskine is
not dead of a broken heart. Erskine and I and our wives are very
much in and out at one another's houses; and I am therefore in a
position to declare that Mrs. Erskine, having escaped by her
marriage from the vile caste in which she was relatively poor and
artificially unhappy and ill-conditioned, is now, as the pretty
wife of an art-critic, relatively rich, as well as pleasant,
active, and in sound health. Her chief trouble, as far as I can
judge, is the impossibility of shaking off her distinguished
relatives, who furtively quit their abject splendor to drop in
upon her for dinner and a little genuine human society much
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