| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lysis by Plato: Of course not.
And he who wants nothing will desire nothing?
He will not.
Neither can he love that which he does not desire?
He cannot.
And he who loves not is not a lover or friend?
Clearly not.
What place then is there for friendship, if, when absent, good men have no
need of one another (for even when alone they are sufficient for
themselves), and when present have no use of one another? How can such
persons ever be induced to value one another?
Lysis |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Confidence by Henry James: but it was an incontestable fact that at times he sipped it as a medicine,
rather than quaffed it as a nectar. When people congratulated him
on his opportunity of seeing the world, and said they envied him
the privilege of seeing it so well, he felt even more than the usual
degree of irritation produced by an insinuation that fortune thinks
so poorly of us as to give us easy terms. Misplaced sympathy is the least
available of superfluities, and Bernard at this time found himself
thinking that there was a good deal of impertinence in the world.
He would, however, readily have confessed that, in so far as he failed
to enjoy his Oriental wanderings, the fault was his own; though he would
have made mentally the gratifying reflection that never was a fault
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett: was in trade there an' doin' very well, but that was years ago."
"I never heard anything more than that; he went to the war in
one o' the early regiments. No, I never heard any more of him,"
answered Mrs. Todd. "Joanna was another sort of person, and
perhaps he showed good judgment in marryin' somebody else, if only
he'd behaved straight-forward and manly. He was a shifty-eyed,
coaxin' sort of man, that got what he wanted out o' folks, an' only
gave when he wanted to buy, made friends easy and lost 'em without
knowin' the difference. She'd had a piece o' work tryin' to make
him walk accordin' to her right ideas, but she'd have had
too much variety ever to fall into a melancholy. Some is meant to
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