| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey: the polished butts of his guns; colder and steadier became his
hands as he wiped the clammy sweat from his face or reached low
to his gun-sheaths. Men meeting him in the walk gave him wide
berth. In front of Bevin's store a crowd melted apart for his
passage, and their faces and whispers were faces and whispers of
a dream. He turned a corner to meet Tull face to face, eye to
eye. As once before he had seen this man pale to a ghastly, livid
white so again he saw the change. Tull stopped in his tracks,
with right hand raised and shaking. Suddenly it dropped, and he
seemed to glide aside, to pass out of Venters's sight. Next he
saw many horses with bridles down--all clean-limbed, dark bays or
Riders of the Purple Sage |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling: Bombay, of the best book of Indian history ever written.
When he sold off before retiring, some years later, I was turning
over his shelves, and came across the only existing copy of "Native
Rule in Central India"--the copy that Miss Venner could not
understand. I read it, sitting on his mule-trucks, as long as the
light lasted, and offered him his own price for it. He looked over
my shoulder for a few pages and said to himself drearily:--"Now, how
in the world did I come to write such damned good stuff as that?"
Then to me:--"Take it and keep it. Write one of your penny-farthing
yarns about its birth. Perhaps--perhaps--the whole business may
have been ordained to that end."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: There were other flowers in the box once; a bunch of white acacia flowers,
gathered by the strong hand of a man, as we passed down a village street on
a sultry afternoon, when it had rained, and the drops fell on us from the
leaves of the acacia trees. The flowers were damp; they made mildew marks
on the paper I folded them in. After many years I threw them away. There
is nothing of them left in the box now, but a faint, strong smell of dried
acacia, that recalls that sultry summer afternoon; but the rose is in the
box still.
It is many years ago now; I was a girl of fifteen, and I went to visit in a
small up-country town. It was young in those days, and two days' journey
from the nearest village; the population consisted mainly of men. A few
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