| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Deputy of Arcis by Honore de Balzac: into a chronic affection, the memories of which, though hidden, are
none the less true and deep.
If we violently oppose this salutary process, we produce an acute
evil, in which the imagination acts upon the heart; and as the latter
from its nature is limited, while the former is infinite, it is
impossible to calculate the violence of the impressions to which a man
may yield himself.
When Marie-Gaston returned to the house at Ville d'Avray, after two
years' absence, he fancied that only a tender if melancholy memory
awaited him; but not a step could he make without recalling his lost
joys and the agony of losing them. The flowers that his wife had
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: altar.
At the time of the French expedition into Spain to establish
Ferdinand VII once more on the throne, a French general came to
the island after the taking of Cadiz, ostensibly to require the
recognition of the King's Government, really to see the convent
and to find some means of entering it. The undertaking was
certainly a delicate one; but a man of passionate temper, whose
life had been, as it were, but one series of poems in action, a
man who all his life long had lived romances instead of writing
them, a man pre-eminently a Doer, was sure to be tempted by a
deed which seemed to be impossible.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart: was burning, and by its light I could make out a plain white
metal bed. A girl was asleep there--or in a half stupor, for she
muttered something now and then. Rosie had taken her courage in
her hands, and coming in had turned up the light. It was only
then that I knew. Fever-flushed, ill as she was, I recognized
Louise Armstrong.
I stood gazing down at her in a stupor of amazement. Louise
here, hiding at the lodge, ill and alone! Rosie came up to the
bed and smoothed the white counterpane.
"I am afraid she is worse to-night," she ventured at last.
I put my hand on the sick girl's forehead. It was burning with
The Circular Staircase |
