The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The American by Henry James: You are a terribly positive gentleman."
"Just now," said Newman, "I'm a terribly impatient gentleman!"
And he bade her good-night and walked rapidly back to the inn.
He ordered his vehicle to be prepared for his return to Poitiers,
and then he shut the door of the common salle and strode toward
the solitary lamp on the chimney-piece. He pulled out the paper
and quickly unfolded it. It was covered with pencil-marks,
which at first, in the feeble light, seemed indistinct.
But Newman's fierce curiosity forced a meaning from the tremulous signs.
The English of them was as follows:--
"My wife has tried to kill me, and she has done it; I am dying,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: any way but has gone on intensifying his own personality, and
producing his own individual work. At first none came to him.
That did not matter. Then the few came to him. That did not
change him. The many have come now. He is still the same. He is
an incomparable novelist. With the decorative arts it is not
different. The public clung with really pathetic tenacity to what
I believe were the direct traditions of the Great Exhibition of
international vulgarity, traditions that were so appalling that the
houses in which people lived were only fit for blind people to live
in. Beautiful things began to be made, beautiful colours came from
the dyer's hand, beautiful patterns from the artist's brain, and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Ten Years Later by Alexandre Dumas: "Sire, you entered into a treaty with Cromwell."
"Yes, and in that very treaty Cromwell signed his name above
mine."
"Why did you sign yours so low down, sire? Cromwell found a
good place, and he took it; that was his custom. I return,
then, to M. Cromwell. You have a treaty with him, that is to
say, with England, since when you signed that treaty M.
Cromwell was England."
"M. Cromwell is dead."
"Do you think so, sire?"
"No doubt he is, since his son Richard has succeeded him,
 Ten Years Later |