| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: The Observer speaks, you will notice, as an Oracle. His words,
anecdotes, and quotations must be accepted as truths, under pain of
being thought without social education or intelligence, and of causing
him to slander you with much zest in twenty salons where he is
considered indispensable. The Observer is forty years of age, never
dines at home, declares himself no longer dangerous to women, wears a
maroon coat, and has a place reserved for him in several boxes at the
"Bouffons." He is sometimes confounded with the Parasite; but he has
filled too many real functions to be thought a sponger; moreover he
possesses a small estate in a certain department, the name of which he
has never been known to utter.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: back to his cheeks.
"Ask him to come in at once, Francis." He felt that he was himself again.
His mood of cowardice had passed away.
The man bowed and retired. In a few moments, Alan Campbell walked in,
looking very stern and rather pale, his pallor being intensified by his
coal-black hair and dark eyebrows.
"Alan! This is kind of you. I thank you for coming."
"I had intended never to enter your house again, Gray. But you said
it was a matter of life and death." His voice was hard and cold.
He spoke with slow deliberation. There was a look of contempt
in the steady searching gaze that he turned on Dorian.
The Picture of Dorian Gray |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: business called him to that almost suburban region beyond the
Trocadero, and there was much less chance of meeting her than if
she had been in the centre of Paris.
All day he wandered, avoiding the fashionable quarters, the
streets in which private motors glittered five deep, and furred
and feathered silhouettes glided from them into tea-rooms,
picture-galleries and jewellers' shops. In some such scenes
Susy was no doubt figuring: slenderer, finer, vivider, than the
other images of clay, but imitating their gestures, chattering
their jargon, winding her hand among the same pearls and sables.
He struck away across the Seine, along the quays to the Cite,
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