| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: unreality. Tomorrow, yes, in a few hours, there would be the
Vestibule Limited and the world.
"Well, if you'll take good care of me. I used to be able to
climb, when I was a little girl."
Once at the top and seated on the platform, they were silent.
Margaret wondered if she would not hunger for that scene all her
life, through all the routine of the days to come. Above them
stretched the great Western sky, serenely blue, even in the night,
with its big, burning stars, never so cold and dead and far away as
in denser atmospheres. The moon would not be up for twenty minutes
yet, and all about the horizon, that wide horizon, which
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: address myself to the company. - I believe in temperance, nay,
almost in abstinence, as a rule for healthy people. I trust that I
practice both. But let me tell you, there are companies of men of
genius into which I sometimes go, where the atmosphere of intellect
and sentiment is so much more stimulating than alcohol, that, if I
thought fit to take wine, it would be to keep me sober.
Among the gentlemen that I have known, few, if any, were ruined by
drinking. My few drunken acquaintances were generally ruined
before they became drunkards. The habit of drinking is often a
vice, no doubt, - sometimes a misfortune, - as when an almost
irresistible hereditary propensity exists to indulge in it, - but
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Two Noble Kinsmen by William Shakespeare: EMILIA.
O sacred, shadowie, cold and constant Queene,
Abandoner of Revells, mute, contemplative,
Sweet, solitary, white as chaste, and pure
As windefand Snow, who to thy femall knights
Alow'st no more blood than will make a blush,
Which is their orders robe: I heere, thy Priest,
Am humbled fore thine Altar; O vouchsafe,
With that thy rare greene eye, which never yet
Beheld thing maculate, looke on thy virgin;
And, sacred silver Mistris, lend thine eare
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