| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane: he could not defend himself against this agency.
It was not within the power of vigilance.
CHAPTER XI.
HE became aware that the furnace roar of the
battle was growing louder. Great brown clouds
had floated to the still heights of air before him.
The noise, too, was approaching. The woods
filtered men and the fields became dotted.
As he rounded a hillock, he perceived that the
roadway was now a crying mass of wagons,
teams, and men. From the heaving tangle issued
 The Red Badge of Courage |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: Embankment, fixing his eyes upon the house.
Lights burnt in the three long windows of the drawing-room. The space
of the room behind became, in Ralph's vision, the center of the dark,
flying wilderness of the world; the justification for the welter of
confusion surrounding it; the steady light which cast its beams, like
those of a lighthouse, with searching composure over the trackless
waste. In this little sanctuary were gathered together several
different people, but their identity was dissolved in a general glory
of something that might, perhaps, be called civilization; at any rate,
all dryness, all safety, all that stood up above the surge and
preserved a consciousness of its own, was centered in the drawing-room
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from One Basket by Edna Ferber: burden, relaxed, chubby, fat-cheeked. The waiting men smoked
their pipes and conversed largely. "Hello, Ed. The woman's
inside, buyin' the store out, I guess."
"That so? Mine, to. Well, how's everything?"
Tessie knew that presently the woman would come out, bundle
laden, and that she would stow these lesser bundles in every
corner left available by the more important sleeping bundle--two
yards of oilcloth; a spool of 100, white; a banana for the baby;
a new stewpan at the five-and-ten.
There had been a time when Tessie, if she thought of these women
at all, felt sorry for them--worn, drab, lacking in style and
 One Basket |