| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde: rarely of a first-rate brand.
ALGERNON. Good heavens! Is marriage so demoralising as that?
LANE. I believe it IS a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very
little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been
married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding
between myself and a young person.
ALGERNON. [Languidly.] I don't know that I am much interested in
your family life, Lane.
LANE. No, sir; it is not a very interesting subject. I never
think of it myself.
ALGERNON. Very natural, I am sure. That will do, Lane, thank you.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen: is impossible he should escape as he is now. A man--
a sensible man like Dr. Grant, cannot be in the habit
of teaching others their duty every week, cannot go
to church twice every Sunday, and preach such very good
sermons in so good a manner as he does, without being
the better for it himself. It must make him think;
and I have no doubt that he oftener endeavours to restrain
himself than he would if he had been anything but a clergyman."
"We cannot prove to the contrary, to be sure; but I wish
you a better fate, Miss Price, than to be the wife of a man
whose amiableness depends upon his own sermons; for though
Mansfield Park |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: my attention. Yet in these vaticinations, the true, patent danger
was left out. Like Christian, it was from my pack I suffered by
the way. Before telling my own mishaps, let me in two words relate
the lesson of my experience. If the pack is well strapped at the
ends, and hung at full length - not doubled, for your life - across
the pack-saddle, the traveller is safe. The saddle will certainly
not fit, such is the imperfection of our transitory life; it will
assuredly topple and tend to overset; but there are stones on every
roadside, and a man soon learns the art of correcting any tendency
to overbalance with a well-adjusted stone.
On the day of my departure I was up a little after five; by six, we
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