The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: hope that you will look on my fears as a refinement of friendship. You
and your mother have done all that you could to put him above his
social position; but when you stimulated his ambition, did you not
unthinkingly condemn him to a hard struggle? How can he maintain
himself in the society to which his tastes incline him? I know Lucien;
he likes to reap, he does not like toil; it is his nature. Social
claims will take up the whole of his time, and for a man who has
nothing but his brains, time is capital. He likes to shine; society
will stimulate his desires until no money will satisfy them; instead
of earning money, he will spend it. You have accustomed him to believe
in his great powers, in fact, but the world at large declines to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Faith of Men by Jack London: Leclere grinned. Slackwater took a chew of tobacco, rove a running
noose, and proceeded leisurely to coil a few turns in his hand. He
paused once or twice to brush particularly offensive mosquitoes
from off his face. Everybody was brushing mosquitoes, except
Leclere, about whose head a small cloud was visible. Even Batard,
lying full-stretched on the ground with his fore paws rubbed the
pests away from eyes and mouth.
But while Slackwater waited for Batard to lift his head, a faint
call came from the quiet air, and a man was seen waving his arms
and running across the flat from Sunrise. It was the store-keeper.
"C-call 'er off, boys," he panted, as he came in among them.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: blindness and tyranny of his which had poisoned her childhood and
raised bitter storms, so that even now she woke in the night trembling
with rage and remembered some command of his; some insolence: "Do
this," "Do that," his dominance: his "Submit to me."
So she said nothing, but looked doggedly and sadly at the shore,
wrapped in its mantle of peace; as if the people there had fallen
asleep, she thought; were free like smoke, were free to come and go
like ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought.
5
Yes, that is their boat, Lily Briscoe decided, standing on the edge of
the lawn. It was the boat with greyish-brown sails, which she saw now
 To the Lighthouse |