| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: She repeated the same words and reddened slightly as she did so.
"Gibbon! What on earth d'you want him for?" he enquired.
"Somebody advised me to read it," Rachel stammered.
"But I don't travel about with a miscellaneous collection
of eighteenth-century historians!" her uncle exclaimed.
"Gibbon! Ten big volumes at least."
Rachel said that she was sorry to interrupt, and was turning to go.
"Stop!" cried her uncle. He put down his pipe, placed his book on one side,
and rose and led her slowly round the room, holding her by the arm.
"Plato," he said, laying one finger on the first of a row of small
dark books, "and Jorrocks next door, which is wrong. Sophocles, Swift.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Episode Under the Terror by Honore de Balzac: trembling, and the tears stood in their eyes.
"Do not fear," he said frankly. "I know your names and the name of
your guest. Three days ago I heard of your distress and devotion to
the venerable Abbe de----"
"Hush!" Sister Agathe cried, in the simplicity of her heart, as she
laid her finger on her lips.
"You see, Sisters, that if I had conceived the horrible idea of
betraying you, I could have given you up already, more than once----"
At the words the priest came out of his hiding-place and stood in
their midst.
"I cannot believe, monsieur, that you can be one of our persecutors,"
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Laches by Plato: it--that is what you were saying?
NICIAS: I was.
SOCRATES: Then this is certainly not a thing which every pig would know,
as the proverb says, and therefore he could not be courageous.
NICIAS: I think not.
SOCRATES: Clearly not, Nicias; not even such a big pig as the Crommyonian
sow would be called by you courageous. And this I say not as a joke, but
because I think that he who assents to your doctrine, that courage is the
knowledge of the grounds of fear and hope, cannot allow that any wild beast
is courageous, unless he admits that a lion, or a leopard, or perhaps a
boar, or any other animal, has such a degree of wisdom that he knows things
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