| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Distinguished Provincial at Paris by Honore de Balzac: "Once you pointed out fair hopes to me in the skies, I awake to
find reality in the squalid poverty of Paris. While you pass, and
others bow before you, on your brilliant path in the great world,
I, I whom you deserted on the threshold, shall be shivering in the
wretched garret to which you consigned me. Yet some pang may
perhaps trouble your mind amid festivals and pleasures; you may
think sometimes of the child whom you thrust into the depths. If
so, madame, think of him without remorse. Out of the depths of his
misery the child offers you the one thing left to him--his
forgiveness in a last look. Yes, madame, thanks to you, I have
nothing left. Nothing! was not the world created from nothing?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Secret Places of the Heart by H. G. Wells: "I WANT her. . . . Do you hear, Martin? I want her. "
As if by a lightning flash he saw his car with himself and
Miss Grammont--Miss Seyffert had probably fallen out--
traversing Europe and Asia in headlong flight. To a sunlit
beach in the South Seas. . . .
His thoughts presently resumed as though these unmannerly and
fantastic interruptions had not occurred.
"We have to carry the whole affair on to a Higher Plane--and
keep it there. We two love one another--that has to be
admitted now. (I ought never to have touched her. I ought
never to have thought of touching her.) But we two are too
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: a fugitive slave, have, like Charles T. Torrey, perished in prison.
The abolition of slavery in my native State and throughout the country,
and the lapse of time, render the caution hitherto observed
no longer necessary. But even since the abolition of slavery,
I have sometimes thought it well enough to baffle curiosity
by saying that while slavery existed there were good reasons
for not telling the manner of my escape, and since slavery
had ceased to exist, there was no reason for telling it.
I shall now, however, cease to avail myself of this formula, and,
as far as I can, endeavor to satisfy this very natural curiosity.
I should, perhaps, have yielded to that feeling sooner, had there been
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