| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen: I am sure you could never be civil to him."
Marianne hardly knew what to say. She would
not wound the feelings of her sister on any account,
and yet to say what she did not believe was impossible.
At length she replied:
"Do not be offended, Elinor, if my praise of him
is not in every thing equal to your sense of his merits.
I have not had so many opportunities of estimating the minuter
propensities of his mind, his inclinations and tastes,
as you have; but I have the highest opinion in the world
of his goodness and sense. I think him every thing that is
Sense and Sensibility |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: clamorously through the bare garage--then I saw Wilson standing on the
raised threshold of his office, swaying back and forth and holding to
the doorposts with both hands. Some man was talking to him in a low
voice and attempting, from time to time, to lay a hand on his shoulder,
but Wilson neither heard nor saw. His eyes would drop slowly from the
swinging light to the laden table by the wall, and then jerk back to
the light again, and he gave out incessantly his high, horrible call:
"Oh, my Ga-od! Oh, my Ga-od! oh, Ga-od! oh, my Ga-od!"
Presently Tom lifted his head with a jerk and, after staring around the
garage with glazed eyes, addressed a mumbled incoherent remark to the
policeman.
The Great Gatsby |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: bad health, insomnia, then the arrival of D----, the friend of
H---- that I wrote you about. He is sitting at tea talking to the
ladies, neither understanding the other; so I left them, and want
to write what little I can of all that I think about you.
Even supposing that S---- A---- demands too much of you,¹
there is no harm in waiting; especially from the point of view of
fortifying your opinions, your faith. That is the one important
thing. If you don't, it is a fearful disaster to put off from one
shore and not reach the other.
The one shore is an honest and good life, for your own delight
and the profit of others. But there is a bad life, too--a life so
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