| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: happy illusion of idleness? He could recognise on the other hand
that he had probably not been without reason, in his prior, his
restricted state, for keeping an eye on his liability to lapse
from good faith.
He really continued in the picture--that being for himself his
situation--all the rest of this rambling day; so that the charm was
still, was indeed more than ever upon him when, toward six o'clock
he found himself amicably engaged with a stout white-capped
deep-voiced woman at the door of the auberge of the biggest village,
a village that affected him as a thing of whiteness, blueness and
crookedness, set in coppery green, and that had the river flowing
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: story - a bad one, I mean - who has industry and paper and
time enough; but not every one may hope to write even a bad
novel. It is the length that kills.
The accepted novelist may take his novel up and put it down,
spend days upon it in vain, and write not any more than he
makes haste to blot. Not so the beginner. Human nature has
certain rights; instinct - the instinct of self-preservation
- forbids that any man (cheered and supported by the
consciousness of no previous victory) should endure the
miseries of unsuccessful literary toil beyond a period to be
measured in weeks. There must be something for hope to feed
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: art, that created politics, that raised up the great princely houses.
By extending the action of one government over a vast expanse of
country it is frittered down. The Italian republics were the glory of
Europe in the middle ages. Why has Italy succumbed when the Swiss, who
were her porters, have triumphed?"
"The Swiss republics," said the doctor, "were worthy housewives, busy
with their own little concerns, and neither having any cause for
envying another. Your republics were haughty queens, preferring to
sell themselves rather than bow to a neighbor; they fell too low ever
to rise again. The Guelphs are triumphant."
"Do not pity us too much," said the Duchess, in a voice that made the
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