| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson: Or knowing, being sorry for poor clay
And saying nothing. . . . Yet, for all his engines,
You'll meet a thousand of an afternoon
Who strut and sun themselves and see around 'em
A world made out of more that has a reason
Than his, I swear, that he sees here to-day;
Though he may scarcely give a Fool an exit
But we mark how he sees in everything
A law that, given we flout it once too often,
Brings fire and iron down on our naked heads.
To me it looks as if the power that made him,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: so drew me to you, Armand, you went from the desert to the oasis
with a good guide to show you the way. Well, I am going out of
the oasis into the desert, and you are a pitiless guide to me.
And yet you only, my friend, can understand how melancholy it is
to look back for the last time on happiness--to you, and you
only, I can make moan without a blush. If you grant my entreaty,
I shall be happy; if you are inexorable, I shall expiate the
wrong that I have done. After all, it is natural, is it not,
that a woman should wish to live, invested with all noble
feelings, in her friend's memory? Oh! my one and only love, let
her to whom you gave life go down into the tomb in the belief
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: Palissy, Louis XI., Fox, Napoleon, Christopher Columbus, and Julius
Caesar,--all these world-famous gamblers had begun life hampered with
debt, or as poor men; all of them had been misunderstood, taken for
madmen, reviled for bad sons, bad brothers, bad fathers; and yet in
after life each one had come to be the pride of his family, of his
country, of the civilized world.
Her arguments fell upon fertile soil in the worst of Lucien's nature,
and spread corruption in his heart; for him, when his desires were
hot, all means were admissible. But--failure is high treason against
society; and when the fallen conqueror has run amuck through bourgeois
virtues, and pulled down the pillars of society, small wonder that
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