| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: constraint, till every least occurrence came to have an excessive
importance.
"I beheld her, not for brief moments, but for whole hours. There were
pauses between my question and her answer, and long musings, when,
with the tones of her voice lingering in my ears, I sought to divine
from them the secret of her inmost thoughts; perhaps her fingers would
tremble as I gave her some object of which she had been in search, or
I would devise pretexts to lightly touch her dress or her hair, to
take her hand in mine, to compel her to speak more than she wished;
all these nothings were great events for me. Eyes and voice and
gestures were freighted with mysterious messages of love in hours of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: something else to think of, and cannot pause to notice your
loops and flourishes; they are beside the mark, and the first
law stationer could put you to the blush. Rousseau, indeed,
made some account of penmanship, even made it a source of
livelihood, when he copied out the HELOISE for DILETTANTE
ladies; and therein showed that strange eccentric prudence
which guided him among so many thousand follies and
insanities. It would be well for all of the GENUS IRRITABILE
thus to add something of skilled labour to intangible brain-
work. To find the right word is so doubtful a success and
lies so near to failure, that there is no satisfaction in a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Four Arthurian Romances by Chretien DeTroyes: as I have thought it out, for I know full well that I must die.
So I will speak regardless of results. For if I die for my
lord's sake, I shall not die an ignoble death, for the facts are
generally known about that oath and pledge which you gave to your
brother, that after you Cliges should be emperor, who now is
banished as a wanderer. But if God will, he shall yet be
emperor! Hence you are open to reproach, for you ought not to
have taken a wife; yet you married her and did Cliges a wrong,
and he has done you no wrong at all. And if I am punished with
death by you, and if I die wrongfully for his sake, and if he is
still alive, he will avenge my death on you. Now go and do the
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