| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: return but contemptuous glances; all were made to feel the shock of
that insulting indifference which, like a spring frost, destroys the
germs of flattering hopes. Beaux, wits, and fops, men whose sentiments
are fed by sucking their canes, those of a great name, or a great
fame, those of the highest or the lowest rank in her own world, they
all blanch before her. She has conquered the right to converse as long
and as often as she chooses with the men who seem to her agreeable,
without being entered on the tablets of gossip. Certain coquettish
women are capable of following a plan of this kind for seven years in
order to gratify their fancies later; but to suppose any such
reservations in the Marquise de Listomere would be to calumniate her.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by William and Ellen Craft: ter has advised me not to worry and send my soul
to hell for the sake of niggers; but to sell every
blessed one of them for what they will fetch, and go
and live in peace with him in New York. This I
have concluded to do. I have just been to Rich-
mond and made arrangements with my agent to
make clean work of the forty that are left."
"Your son being a good Christian minister,"
said the gentleman, "It's strange he did not advise
you to let the poor negroes have their liberty and
go North."
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 2 by Alexis de Toqueville: tired of it. Amongst aristocratic nations every man is pretty
nearly stationary in his own sphere; but men are astonishingly
unlike each other - their passions, their notions, their habits,
and their tastes are essentially different: nothing changey, but
everything differs. In democracies, on the contrary, all men are
alike and do things pretty nearly alike. It is true that they
are subject to great and frequent vicissitudes; but as the same
events of good or adverse fortune are continually recurring, the
name of the actors only is changed, the piece is always the same.
The aspect of American society is animated, because men and
things are always changing; but it is monotonous, because all
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