The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: "And we thank you most feelingly."
Marya Vassilyevna drank her tea with satisfaction, and she, too,
began turning red like the peasants, and fell to thinking again
about firewood, about the watchman. . . .
"Stay, old man," she heard from the next table, "it's the
schoolmistress from Vyazovye. . . . We know her; she's a good
young lady."
"She's all right!"
The swing-door was continually banging, some coming in, others
going out. Marya Vassilyevna sat on, thinking all the time of the
same things, while the concertina went on playing and playing.
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: with great volubility and many digressions, as soon as I told
him who I was, that my steamer was at the bottom of the river.
I was thunderstruck. What, how, why? Oh, it was `all right.'
The `manager himself' was there. All quite correct.
`Everybody had behaved splendidly! splendidly!'--'you must,'
he said in agitation, `go and see the general manager at once.
He is waiting!'
"I did not see the real significance of that wreck at once.
I fancy I see it now, but I am not sure--not at all.
Certainly the affair was too stupid--when I think of it--
to be altogether natural. Still . . . But at the moment it presented
Heart of Darkness |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: upholstered in red plush, near by, where, much to the vegetarian's
disapproval, you could buy steak, two inches thick, or a roast section
of fowl, swimming in a pewter dish.
"The bare branches against the sky do one so much GOOD," Mrs. Seal
asserted, looking out into the Square.
"But one can't lunch off trees, Sally," said Mary.
"I confess I don't know how you manage it, Miss Datchet," Mr. Clacton
remarked. "I should sleep all the afternoon, I know, if I took a heavy
meal in the middle of the day."
"What's the very latest thing in literature?" Mary asked, good-
humoredly pointing to the yellow-covered volume beneath Mr. Clacton's
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