| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: with the theory and practice of natural philosophy as depended on the
lessons of any of the professors at Ingolstadt, my residence there
being no longer conducive to my improvements, I thought of returning
to my friends and my native town, when an incident happened that
protracted my stay.
One of the phenomena which had peculiarly attracted my attention
was the structure of the human frame, and, indeed, any animal
endued with life. Whence, I often asked myself, did the
principle of life proceed? It was a bold question, and one which
has ever been considered as a mystery; yet with how many things
are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or
Frankenstein |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: to have forgotten that he had ever shown any awkward aberrancies:
and he daily mounted to the parapets and copings of colleges he could
never enter, and renewed the crumbling freestones of mullioned
windows he would never look from, as if he had known no wish to
do otherwise.
There was this change in him; that he did not often go to any service
at the churches now. One thing troubled him more than any other; that Sue
and himself had mentally travelled in opposite directions since the tragedy:
events which had enlarged his own views of life, laws, customs, and dogmas,
had not operated in the same manner on Sue's. She was no longer the same as in
the independent days, when her intellect played like lambent lightning over
Jude the Obscure |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: "I mean in the light of a husband. He is very kind, I think--really
very good about the cottages. A well-meaning man."
"But you must have a scholar, and that sort of thing? Well, it lies
a little in our family. I had it myself--that love of knowledge,
and going into everything--a little too much--it took me too far;
though that sort of thing doesn't often run in the female-line;
or it runs underground like the rivers in Greece, you know--it
comes out in the sons. Clever sons, clever mothers. I went
a good deal into that, at one time. However, my dear, I have
always said that people should do as they like in these things,
up to a certain point. I couldn't, as your guardian, have consented
Middlemarch |
