| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: daughter: "That is, if he has your permission, Sybilla."
The girl rose without a word, and laying aside her work, took a
key from a secret drawer in one of the cabinets, while the doctor
continued in the same note of grim jocularity: "For you must know
that the picture is not mine--it is my daughter's."
He followed with evident amusement the surprised glance which
Wyant turned on the young girl's impassive figure.
"Sybilla," he pursued, "is a votary of the arts; she has
inherited her fond father's passion for the unattainable.
Luckily, however, she also recently inherited a tidy legacy from
her grandmother; and having seen the Leonardo, on which its
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the
insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed
no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration
which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause
of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself
should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less
fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray
to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other.
It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's
assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces;
Second Inaugural Address |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: they owe too much. There is such compulsory ingratitude; but what
heart that has sown good to reap gratitude can think itself great?
By the end of the second year of his apostolic work, Popinot had
turned the storeroom at the bottom of his house into a parlor, lighted
by the three iron-barred windows. The walls and ceiling of this
spacious room were whitewashed, and the furniture consisted of wooden
benches like those seen in schools, a clumsy cupboard, a walnut-wood
writing-table, and an armchair. In the cupboard were his registers of
donations, his tickets for orders for bread, and his diary. He kept
his ledger like a tradesman, that he might not be ruined by kindness.
All the sorrows of the neighborhood were entered and numbered in a
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