| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad: the Marine Superintendent, the Harbour-Master
--a very great person in the eyes of every single
quill-driver in the room. But that was nothing to
the opinion he had of his own greatness.
Captain Ellis looked upon himself as a sort of
divine (pagan) emanation, the deputy-Neptune for
the circumambient seas. If he did not actually
rule the waves, he pretended to rule the fate of
the mortals whose lives were cast upon the
waters.
This uplifting illusion made him inquisitorial
 The Shadow Line |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tour Through Eastern Counties of England by Daniel Defoe: pickled up in small casks, and sold, not in London only, but I have
known a firkin of Suffolk butter sent to the West Indies, and
brought back to England again, and has been perfectly good and
sweet, as at first.
The port for the shipping off their Suffolk butter is chiefly
Woodbridge, which for that reason is full of corn factors and
butter factors, some of whom are very considerable merchants.
From hence, turning down to the shore, we see Orfordness, a noted
point of land for the guide of the colliers and coasters, and a
good shelter for them to ride under when a strong north-east wind
blows and makes a foul shore on the coast.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: or scarred his cheek, would have destroyed one of the most beautiful
Italian faces which a woman ever dreamed of in all its delicate
proportions. This face, not unlike the type which Girodet has given to
the dying young Turk, in the "Revolt at Cairo," was instinct with that
melancholy by which all women are more or less duped.
The Marquis de Montefiore possessed an entailed property, but his
income was mortgaged for a number of years to pay off the costs of
certain Italian escapades which are inconceivable in Paris. He had
ruined himself in supporting a theatre at Milan in order to force upon
a public a very inferior prima donna, whom he was said to love madly.
A fine future was therefore before him, and he did not care to risk it
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