| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: elegant slippers of seal-brown, shaped like medieval shoes. He brought up an
apple from the barrel which stood by the trunk-closet in the basement.
"An apple a day keeps the doctor away," he enlightened Mrs. Babbitt, for quite
the first time in fourteen hours.
"That's so."
"An apple is Nature's best regulator."
"Yes, it--"
"Trouble with women is, they never have sense enough to form regular habits."
"Well, I--"
"Always nibbling and eating between meals."
"George!" She looked up from her reading. "Did you have a light lunch
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: Indeed no change could have been greater. On both banks of the river lay
an open lawn-like space, grass covered and planted, for the gentleness
and order of the place suggested human care, with graceful trees
on the top of little mounds. As far as they could gaze, this lawn
rose and sank with the undulating motion of an old English park.
The change of scene naturally suggested a change of position,
grateful to most of them. They rose and leant over the rail.
"It might be Arundel or Windsor," Mr. Flushing continued, "if you
cut down that bush with the yellow flowers; and, by Jove, look!"
Rows of brown backs paused for a moment and then leapt with a motion
as if they were springing over waves out of sight.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: Even then observation had come to be an instinct with me; a faculty of
penetrating to the soul without neglecting the body; or rather, a
power of grasping external details so thoroughly that they never
detained me for a moment, and at once I passed beyond and through
them. I could enter into the life of the human creatures whom I
watched, just as the dervish in the /Arabian Nights/ could pass into
any soul or body after pronouncing a certain formula.
If I met a working man and his wife in the streets between eleven
o'clock and midnight on their way home from the Ambigu Comique, I used
to amuse myself by following them from the Boulevard du Pont aux Choux
to the Boulevard Beaumarchais. The good folk would begin by talking
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