| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Poems by T. S. Eliot: How keen you are!)
To find a friend who has these qualities,
Who has, and gives
Those qualities upon which friendship lives.
How much it means that I say this to you--
Without these friendships--life, what cauchemar!"
Among the windings of the violins
And the ariettes
Of cracked cornets
Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins
Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: boast. Here many visits were paid to him by the ministers
and officers of the insurgent force. In his description of
these interviews he displays a vein of satiric severity,
admitting any kindness that was done to him with some
qualifying souvenir of former harshness, and gloating over
any injury, mistake, or folly, which it was his chance to
suffer or to hear. He appears, notwithstanding all this, to
have been on pretty good terms with his cruel 'phanaticks,'
as the following extract sufficiently proves:
'Most of the foot were lodged about the church or churchyard,
and order given to ring bells next morning for a sermon to be
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: understandable; but--That life itself should have no motive--that we
neither care to find out what it may lead to, nor to guard against
its being for ever taken away from us--here is a mystery indeed.
For just suppose I were able to call at this moment to any one in
this audience by name, and to tell him positively that I knew a
large estate had been lately left to him on some curious conditions;
but that though I knew it was large, I did not know how large, nor
even where it was--whether in the East Indies or the West, or in
England, or at the Antipodes. I only knew it was a vast estate, and
that there was a chance of his losing it altogether if he did not
soon find out on what terms it had been left to him. Suppose I were
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