| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce: "O cruel cook, pray grant me some relief --
Some respite from the roast, however brief."
"Remember how on earth I pardoned all
Your friends in Illinois when held in thrall."
"Unhappy soul! for that alone you squirm
O'er fire unquenched, a never-dying worm.
"Yet, for I pity your uneasy state,
Your doom I'll mollify and pains abate.
"Naught, for a season, shall your comfort mar,
Not even the memory of who you are."
Throughout eternal space dread silence fell;
The Devil's Dictionary |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: played it frankly. Archie was the one person in church who was of
interest, who was somebody new, reputed eccentric, known to be young,
and a laird, and still unseen by Christina. Small wonder that, as
she stood there in her attitude of pretty decency, her mind should run
upon him! If he spared a glance in her direction, he should know she
was a well-behaved young lady who had been to Glasgow. In reason he
must admire her clothes, and it was possible that he should think her
pretty. At that her heart beat the least thing in the world; and she
proceeded, by way of a corrective, to call up and dismiss a series of
fancied pictures of the young man who should now, by rights, be looking
at her. She settled on the plainest of them, - a pink short young man
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: Vilquins; the postmaster was already looking at him slyly.
"Is there there any one staying with them at the present moment," he
asked, "besides the family?"
"The d'Herouville family is there just now. They do talk of a marriage
between the young duke and the remaining Mademoiselle Vilquin."
"Ha!" thought Ernest; "there was a celebrated Cardinal d'Herouville
under the Valois, and a terrible marshal whom they made a duke in the
time of Henri IV."
Ernest returned to Paris having seen enough of Modeste to dream of
her, and to think that, whether she were rich or whether she were
poor, if she had a noble soul he would like to make her Madame de La
Modeste Mignon |
