Today's Stichomancy for Steve Martin

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Lover's Complaint by William Shakespeare:

Like usury applying wet to wet, Or monarchs' hands, that lets not bounty fall Where want cries 'some,' but where excess begs all.

Of folded schedules had she many a one, Which she perus'd, sigh'd, tore, and gave the flood; Crack'd many a ring of posied gold and bone, Bidding them find their sepulchres in mud; Found yet mo letters sadly penn'd in blood, With sleided silk feat and affectedly Enswath'd, and seal'd to curious secrecy.

These often bath'd she in her fluxive eyes,

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Stories From the Old Attic by Robert Harris:

product of nineteenth-century Europe. Don't make it a habit to go around quoting hoaxes. It gives philosophy a bad name."

"Excuse me, sirs," the youth interjected, "but I have to go now."

"Very well," said the beard. "Only remember, with the knowledge you attain, seek to achieve understanding."

"Oh, so now we are quoting the Bible!" cried the glasses with triumphant scorn. "The rest of the department will be interested in this."

"I was not quoting the Bible. I have never even read the Bible."

"Why don't you ask God to bless him while you're at it?"

"Listen, don't you think I know that your doctrine of cosmic mental

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot:

immediately on his entering that Will had just gone away, and would come again, but Mr. Casaubon had said, "I met him outside, and we made our final adieux, I believe," saying this with the air and tone by which we imply that any subject, whether private or public, does not interest us enough to wish for a further remark upon it. So Dorothea had waited.

"What is that, my love?" said Mr Casaubon (he always said "my love" when his manner was the coldest).

"He has made up his mind to leave off wandering at once, and to give up his dependence on your generosity. He means soon to go back to England, and work his own way. I thought you would consider that a good sign,"

Middlemarch

The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Poems by T. S. Eliot:

That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room." --And so the conversation slips Among velleities and carefully caught regrets Through attenuated tones of violins Mingled with remote cornets And begins.

"You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends, And how, how rare and strange it is, to find In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends, (For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind! How keen you are!)