| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac: passed from single to wedded life under the protection of Antoine
Cornoiller, who was appointed keeper of all Mademoiselle Grandet's
estates. Madame Cornoiller possessed one striking advantage over her
contemporaries. Although she was fifty-nine years of age, she did not
look more than forty. Her strong features had resisted the ravages of
time. Thanks to the healthy customs of her semi-conventual life, she
laughed at old age from the vantage-ground of a rosy skin and an iron
constitution. Perhaps she never looked as well in her life as she did
on her marriage-day. She had all the benefits of her ugliness, and was
big and fat and strong, with a look of happiness on her indestructible
features which made a good many people envy Cornoiller.
Eugenie Grandet |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: that you view that affair in an objectionable light? Mr.
Bullfrog, I never could have dreamed it! Is it an objection that
I have triumphantly defended myself against slander and
vindicated my purity in a court of justice? Or do you complain
because your wife has shown the proper spirit of a woman, and
punished the villain who trifled with her affections?"
"But," persisted I, shrinking into a corner of the coach,
however,--for I did not know precisely how much contradiction the
proper spirit of a woman would endure,--"but, my love, would it
not have been more dignified to treat the villain with the silent
contempt he merited?"
Mosses From An Old Manse |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Maid Marian by Thomas Love Peacock: train were instantly surrounded by sixty bowmen in green:
how they tied him to a tree, and made him say mass for their sins:
how they unbound him, and sate him down with them to dinner,
and gave him venison and wild-fowl and wine, and made him pay
for his fare all the money in his high selerer's portmanteau,
and enforced him to sleep all night under a tree in his cloak,
and to leave the cloak behind him in the morning: how the abbot,
light in pocket and heavy in heart, raised the country upon
Robin Hood, for so he had heard the chief forester called
by his men, and hunted him into an old woman's cottage:
how Robin changed dresses with the old woman, and how the abbot rode
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