| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: are bound to happen!" "That is what I feel," Mrs. Thornbury rejoined.
"The changes, the improvements, the inventions--and beauty.
D'you know I feel sometimes that I couldn't bear to die and cease
to see beautiful things about me?"
"It would certainly be very dull to die before they have discovered
whether there is life in Mars," Miss Allan added.
"Do you really believe there's life in Mars?" asked Mrs. Flushing,
turning to her for the first time with keen interest. "Who tells
you that? Some one who knows? D'you know a man called--?"
Here Mrs. Thornbury laid down her knitting, and a look of extreme
solicitude came into her eyes.
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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: the dim dusk of the room; an all-pervasive thought nowhere
definitely expressed, and looming the larger in the imagination;
for in the cloister the great saying, "Peace in the Lord,"
enters the least religious soul as a living force.
The monk's life is scarcely comprehensible. A man seems
confessed a weakling in a monastery; he was born to act, to live
out a life of work; he is evading a man's destiny in his cell.
But what man's strength, blended with pathetic weakness, is
implied by a woman's choice of the convent life! A man may have
any number of motives for burying himself in a monastery; for him
it is the leap over the precipice. A woman has but one
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde: happy.
The next day the Swallow flew down to the harbour. He sat on the
mast of a large vessel and watched the sailors hauling big chests
out of the hold with ropes. "Heave a-hoy!" they shouted as each
chest came up. "I am going to Egypt"! cried the Swallow, but
nobody minded, and when the moon rose he flew back to the Happy
Prince.
"I am come to bid you good-bye," he cried.
"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "will you not
stay with me one night longer?"
"It is winter," answered the Swallow, "and the chill snow will soon
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