| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: now the great gate of the palace itself has been forced and the
warriors of the south are pouring into its sacred precincts.
"Where is Salensus Oll? He alone may revive the flagging courage
of our warriors. He alone may save the day for Okar. Where is
Salensus Oll?"
The nobles stepped back from about the dead body of their ruler,
and one of them pointed to the grinning corpse.
The messenger staggered back in horror as though from a blow in the face.
 The Warlord of Mars |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy: progress, and would have attracted the attention of any
casual observer otherwise disposed to overlook them, was the
perfect silence they preserved. They walked side by side in
such a way as to suggest afar off the low, easy,
confidential chat of people full of reciprocity; but on
closer view it could be discerned that the man was reading,
or pretending to read, a ballad sheet which he kept before
his eyes with some difficulty by the hand that was passed
through the basket strap. Whether this apparent cause were
the real cause, or whether it were an assumed one to escape
an intercourse that would have been irksome to him, nobody
 The Mayor of Casterbridge |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: literary, or political prejudices, to do away with the need of having
opinions, just as they adapt their conscience to the standard of the
Code or the Tribunal of Commerce. Having started early to become men
of note, they turn into mediocrities, and crawl over the high places
of the world. So, too, their faces present the harsh pallor, the
deceitful coloring, those dull, tarnished eyes, and garrulous, sensual
mouths, in which the observer recognizes the symptoms of the
degeneracy of the thought and its rotation in the circle of a special
idea which destroys the creative faculties of the brain and the gift
of seeing in large, of generalizing and deducing. No man who has
allowed himself to be caught in the revolutions of the gear of these
 The Girl with the Golden Eyes |