| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: mother had been virtuous as other women are criminal,--in secret; she
had stolen a fancied happiness, she had never really tasted it. But
Juana, unhappy in her virtue as her mother was unhappy in her vice,
could enjoy at all moments the ineffable delights which her mother had
so craved and could not have. To her, as to her mother, maternity
comprised all earthly sentiments. Each, from differing causes, had no
other comfort in their misery. Juana's maternal love may have been the
strongest because, deprived of all other affections, she put the joys
she lacked into the one joy of her children; and there are noble
passions that resemble vice; the more they are satisfied the more they
increase. Mothers and gamblers are alike insatiable.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: awkward collapse. He had got out of me that there was something
I was much afraid of and that he should probably be able to make
use of my fear to gain, for his own purpose, more freedom.
My fear was of having to deal with the intolerable question
of the grounds of his dismissal from school, for that was
really but the question of the horrors gathered behind.
That his uncle should arrive to treat with me of these things
was a solution that, strictly speaking, I ought now to have
desired to bring on; but I could so little face the ugliness
and the pain of it that I simply procrastinated and lived
from hand to mouth. The boy, to my deep discomposure,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Hated Son by Honore de Balzac: also, they stimulated the need that every woman feels to find
distinctive signs in the man she is prompted to love. New ideas, new
sensations were rising in each with a force, with an abundance that
enlarged their souls; both remained silent and overcome, for
sentiments are least demonstrative when most real and deep. All
durable love begins by dreamy meditation. It was suitable that these
two beings should first see each other in the softer light of the
moon, that love and its splendors might not dazzle them too suddenly;
it was well that they met by the shores of the Ocean,--vast image of
the vastness of their feelings. They parted filled with one another,
fearing, each, to have failed to please.
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