| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: In the name of this passing fancy of yours, for the sake of your
career and my own peace of mind, I bid you stay in your own
country; you must not spoil a fair and honorable life for an
illusion which, by its very nature, cannot last. At a later day,
when you have accomplished your real destiny, in the fully
developed manhood that awaits you, you will appreciate this answer
of mine, though to-day it may be that you blame its hardness. You
will turn with pleasure to an old woman whose friendship will
certainly be sweet and precious to you then; a friendship untried
by the extremes of passion and the disenchanting processes of
life; a friendship which noble thoughts and thoughts of religion
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Koran: to them a warner from amongst themselves; and the misbelievers say,
'This is a wondrous thing! What, when we are dead and have become
dust?-that is a remote return!'
We well know what the earth consumes of them, for with us is a
book that keeps (account).
Nay, they call the truth a lie when it comes to them, and they are
in a confused affair.
Do not they behold the heaven above them, how we have built it and
adorned it, and how it has no flaws?
And the earth, we have stretched it out and thrown thereon firm
mountains, and caused to grow thereon every beautiful kind.
The Koran |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: she had loosed herself, took up a stone as they opened the door,
and with a kind of hellish sport threw it after them. They were
out of his reach.
When Maria arrived in town, she drove to the hotel already
fixed on. But she could not sit still--her child was ever before
her; and all that had passed during her confinement, appeared to
be a dream. She went to the house in the suburbs, where, as she
now discovered, her babe had been sent. The moment she entered,
her heart grew sick; but she wondered not that it had proved its
grave. She made the necessary enquiries, and the church-yard was
pointed out, in which it rested under a turf. A little frock which
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