| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: donkey made a grimace at me. The hardened ingratitude of his
behaviour, and the impertinence that inspired his whole face as he
curled up his lip, and showed his teeth, and began to bray, so
tickled me, and was so much in keeping with what I had imagined to
myself about his character, that I could not find it in my heart to
be angry, and burst into a peal of hearty laughter. This seemed to
strike the ass as a repartee, so he brayed at me again by way of
rejoinder; and we went on for a while, braying and laughing, until I
began to grow aweary of it, and, shouting a derisive farewell, turned
to pursue my way. In so doing - it was like going suddenly into cold
water - I found myself face to face with a prim little old maid. She
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 2 by Alexis de Toqueville: Care must therefore be taken not to judge the state of society,
which is now coming into existence, by notions derived from a
state of society which no longer exists; for as these states of
society are exceedingly different in their structure, they cannot
be submitted to a just or fair comparison. It would be scarcely
more reasonable to require of our own contemporaries the peculiar
virtues which originated in the social condition of their
forefathers, since that social condition is itself fallen, and
has drawn into one promiscuous ruin the good and evil which
belonged to it.
But as yet these things are imperfectly understood. I find
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tono Bungay by H. G. Wells: it did not seem to me that so retiring a family as the Durgans,
so old and completely exhausted a family as the Durgans, was
likely to haunt anybody. What living thing now had any concern
with their honour and judgments and good and evil deeds? Ghosts
and witchcraft were a later innovation--that fashion came from
Scotland with the Stuarts.
Afterwards, prying for epitaphs, we found a marble crusader with
a broken nose, under a battered canopy of fretted stone, outside
the restricted limits of the present Duffield church, and half
buried in nettles. "Ichabod," said my uncle. "Eh? We shall be
like that, Susan, some day.... I'm going to clean him up a bit
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