| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Almayer's Folly by Joseph Conrad: "Dain!" he exclaimed. "At last! at last! I have been waiting
for you every day and every night. I had nearly given you up."
"Nothing could have stopped me from coming back here," said the
other, almost violently. "Not even death," he whispered to
himself.
"This is a friend's talk, and is very good," said Almayer,
heartily. "But you are too far here. Drop down to the jetty and
let your men cook their rice in my campong while we talk in the
house."
There was no answer to that invitation.
"What is it?" asked Almayer, uneasily. "There is nothing wrong
 Almayer's Folly |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: Little Mexico, with its crazy wooden houses, endless crazy
wooden stairs, and perilous mountain goat-paths in the sand.
Chinatown by a thousand eccentricities drew and held me; I
could never have enough of its ambiguous, interracial
atmosphere, as of a vitalised museum; never wonder enough at
its outlandish, necromantic-looking vegetables set forth to sell
in commonplace American shop-windows, its temple doors
open and the scent of the joss-stick streaming forth on the
American air, its kites of Oriental fashion hanging fouled in
Western telegraph-wires, its flights of paper prayers which the
trade-wind hunts and dissipates along Western gutters. I was a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: light--and a bright cloud overshadowed them."'
"When a planet contains only those beings who reject the Lord, when
his word is ignored, then the Angelic Spirits are gathered together by
the four winds, and God sends forth an Exterminating Angel to change
the face of the refractory earth, which in the immensity of this
universe is to Him what an unfruitful seed is to Nature. Approaching
the globe, this Exterminating Angel, borne by a comet, causes the
planet to turn upon its axis, and the lands lately covered by the seas
reappear, adorned in freshness and obedient to the laws proclaimed in
Genesis; the Word of God is once more powerful on this new earth,
which everywhere exhibits the effects of terrestrial waters and
 Seraphita |