| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: of yours."
"I have got through all that," said Dorian, shaking his head and smiling.
"I am perfectly happy now. I know what conscience is, to begin with.
It is not what you told me it was. It is the divinest thing in us.
Don't sneer at it, Harry, any more--at least not before me. I want to
be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous."
"A very charming artistic basis for ethics, Dorian! I congratulate you
on it. But how are you going to begin?"
"By marrying Sibyl Vane."
"Marrying Sibyl Vane!" cried Lord Henry, standing up and looking
at him in perplexed amazement. "But, my dear Dorian--"
The Picture of Dorian Gray |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: become very British--as if that, as a process, as a 'Werden,' as
anything but an original sign of grace, were conceivable; but it's
precisely what makes her cling to the notion of the 'Fund'--cling
to it as to a link with the ideal."
"How can she cling if she's dying?"
"Do you mean how can she act in the matter?" Gravener asked.
"That's precisely the question. She can't! As she has never yet
caught her hare, never spied out her lucky impostor--how should
she, with the life she has led?--her husband's intention has come
very near lapsing. His idea, to do him justice, was that it SHOULD
lapse if exactly the right person, the perfect mixture of genius
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: doomed to waste his powers for the profits of the chosen few!
And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant,
but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property.
I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome;
I was not even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than they
and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and
cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs.
When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then,
a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom
all men disowned?
"I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections
Frankenstein |
