| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Fanny Herself by Edna Ferber: failure. No, Fanny Brandeis' struggle went on inside. And
in trying to stifle it she came near making the blackest
failure that a woman can make. In grubbing for the pot of
gold she almost missed the rainbow.
Rabbi Thalmann raised his arms for the benediction. Fanny
looked straight up at him as though stamping a picture on
her mind. His eyes were resting gently on her--or perhaps
she just fancied that he spoke to her alone as he began the
words of the ancient closing prayer:
"May the blessings of the Lord Our God rest upon you. God
bless thee and keep thee. May He cause His countenance to
Fanny Herself |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad: Without "troubling her head about it," she was aware that it "did
not stand looking into very much." But the lamentable
circumstances of Stevie's end, which to Mr Verloc's mind had only
an episodic character, as part of a greater disaster, dried her
tears at their very source. It was the effect of a white-hot iron
drawn across her eyes; at the same time her heart, hardened and
chilled into a lump of ice, kept her body in an inward shudder, set
her features into a frozen contemplative immobility addressed to a
whitewashed wall with no writing on it. The exigencies of Mrs
Verloc's temperament, which, when stripped of its philosophical
reserve, was maternal and violent, forced her to roll a series of
The Secret Agent |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: to fate and walk along in heroic silence, like Marco Bozzaris
"bleeding at every pore,"--or do as Damon and I did, break into
ejaculations and a run, until you reach a place where you can light
a smudge and hold your head over it.
"And yet," said my comrade, as we sat coughing and rubbing our eyes
in the painful shelter of the smoke, "there are worse trials than
this in the civilised districts: social enmities, and newspaper
scandals, and religious persecutions. The blackest fly I ever saw
is the Reverend -----" but here his voice was fortunately choked by
a fit of coughing.
A couple of wandering Indians--descendants of the Montagnais, on
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