| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: "You see"--she tapped the volume of her grandfather's poems--"we don't
even print as well as they did, and as for poets or painters or
novelists--there are none; so, at any rate, I'm not singular."
"No, we haven't any great men," Denham replied. "I'm very glad that we
haven't. I hate great men. The worship of greatness in the nineteenth
century seems to me to explain the worthlessness of that generation."
Katharine opened her lips and drew in her breath, as if to reply with
equal vigor, when the shutting of a door in the next room withdrew her
attention, and they both became conscious that the voices, which had
been rising and falling round the tea-table, had fallen silent; the
light, even, seemed to have sunk lower. A moment later Mrs. Hilbery
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: to gratitude for small mercies; it had broken on them all as a
blessing that their absentee HAD perhaps a conscience--that he was
sated in fine with idleness, was ambitious of variety. The
exhibition was doubtless as yet not brilliant, but Strether
himself, even by that time much enlisted and immersed, had
determined, on the part of the two ladies, a temperate approval
and in fact, as he now recollected, a certain austere enthusiasm.
But the very next thing that happened had been a dark drop of the
curtain. The son and brother had not browsed long on the Montagne
Sainte-Genevieve--his effective little use of the name of which,
like his allusion to the best French, appeared to have been but
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Octopus by Frank Norris: former generation, standing for a different order of things,
absolutely idle, living God knew how, happy with their cigarette,
their guitar, their glass of mescal, and their siesta. The
centenarian remembered Fremont and Governor Alvarado, and the
bandit Jesus Tejeda, and the days when Los Muertos was a Spanish
grant, a veritable principality, leagues in extent, and when
there was never a fence from Visalia to Fresno. Upon this
occasion, Presley offered the old man a drink of mescal, and
excited him to talk of the things he remembered. Their talk was
in Spanish, a language with which Presley was familiar.
"De La Cuesta held the grant of Los Muertos in those days," the
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