| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: attribute to fear as he would have dared immediately to act upon it
for enterprise. It marked none the less a prodigious thrill, a
thrill that represented sudden dismay, no doubt, but also
represented, and with the selfsame throb, the strangest, the most
joyous, possibly the next minute almost the proudest, duplication
of consciousness.
"He has been dodging, retreating, hiding, but now, worked up to
anger, he'll fight!" - this intense impression made a single
mouthful, as it were, of terror and applause. But what was
wondrous was that the applause, for the felt fact, was so eager,
since, if it was his other self he was running to earth, this
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: walls of brass, enclosing the horrors of the desert and the infinite
void. The home is not so much a tomb as that far worse thing--a
convent. In the center of this icy sphere the lawyer could study his
wife dispassionately. He observed, not without keen regret, the
narrow-mindedness that stood confessed in the very way that her hair
grew, low on the forehead, which was slightly depressed; he discovered
in the perfect regularity of her features a certain set rigidity which
before long made him hate the assumed sweetness that had bewitched
him. Intuition told him that one day of disaster those thin lips might
say, "My dear, it is for your good!"
Madame de Granville's complexion was acquiring a dull pallor and an
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beauty and The Beast by Bayard Taylor: salvation,--and added, that his own life had now no further
value unless he should devote it to religious exercises.
"Can you not give me a place in your monastery?" he asked, turning
to the Abbot. "I will endow it with a gift of forty thousand
rubles, for the privilege of occupying a monk's cell."
"Pray, do not decide too hastily, Highness," the Abbot replied.
"You have yet a son."
"What!" yelled Prince Alexis, with flashing eyes, every trace of
humility and renunciation vanishing like smoke,--"what! Borka?
The infamous wretch who has ruined me, killed his mother, and
brought disgrace upon our name? Do you know that he has married a
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