| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Simple Soul by Gustave Flaubert: and chain and lock. A note from the baroness told Madame Aubain that
as her husband had been promoted to a prefecture, they were leaving
that night, and she begged her to accept the bird as a remembrance and
a token of her esteem.
Since a long time the parrot had been on Felicite's mind, because he
came from America, which reminded her of Victor, and she had
approached the negro on the subject.
Once even, she had said:
"How glad Madame would be to have him!"
The man had repeated this remark to his mistress who, not being able
to keep the bird, took this means of getting rid of it.
A Simple Soul |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy: magnificence of its beauty. It sprang from east, west,
north, south, and was a perfect dance of death. The
forms of skeletons appeared in the air, shaped with
blue fire for bones -- dancing, leaping, striding, racing
around, and mingling altogether in unparalleled con-
fusion. With these were intertwined undulating snakes of
green, and behind these was a broad mass of lesser light.
Simultaneously came from every part of the tumbling
sky what may be called a shout; since, though no shout
ever came near it, it was more of the nature of a shout
than of anything else earthly. In the meantime one of
Far From the Madding Crowd |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: renegade; by her pure and high influence the noisome mists were
purged; my feelings, parched, hot, and tarnished, were renovated
with cool, fresh bloom, simple, beautiful to the simple-hearted.'
But Art was not the only cause of the change. 'The writings of
Wordsworth,' he goes on to say, 'did much towards calming the
confusing whirl necessarily incident to sudden mutations. I wept
over them tears of happiness and gratitude.' He accordingly left
the army, with its rough barrack-life and coarse mess-room tittle-
tattle, and returned to Linden House, full of this new-born
enthusiasm for culture. A severe illness, in which, to use his own
words, he was 'broken like a vessel of clay,' prostrated him for a
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