| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Princess of Parms by Edgar Rice Burroughs: This baffled me, I must confess, fully as much as my statements
had confounded her; and I told her so. She then explained
in general the instruments her people had used and been
perfecting for ages, which permit them to throw upon
a screen a perfect image of what is transpiring upon any
planet and upon many of the stars. These pictures are so
perfect in detail that, when photographed and enlarged,
objects no greater than a blade of grass may be distinctly
recognized. I afterward, in Helium, saw many of these
pictures, as well as the instruments which produced them.
"If, then, you are so familiar with earthly things," I asked,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: as formerly, with the added gloom of a weakened hope. By indirect
inquiries he soon perceived clearly what he had long uneasily suspected,
that to qualify himself for certain open scholarships and exhibitions
was the only brilliant course. But to do this a good deal of coaching
would be necessary, and much natural ability. It was next to impossible
that a man reading on his own system, however widely and thoroughly,
even over the prolonged period of ten years, should be able to compete
with those who had passed their lives under trained teachers and had worked
to ordained lines.
The other course, that of buying himself in, so to speak, seemed the only one
really open to men like him, the difficulty being simply of a material kind.
Jude the Obscure |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: but she had a flow of talk that was as steady as a mill,
and made your head sore like the drays and wagons in
a city. If she had had a cork she would have been a
comfort. But you can't cork that kind; they would
die. Her clack was going all day, and you would think
something would surely happen to her works, by and
by; but no, they never got out of order; and she
never had to slack up for words. She could grind,
and pump, and churn, and buzz by the week, and never
stop to oil up or blow out. And yet the result was
just nothing but wind. She never had any ideas, any
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
