| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: the cottage--the bed, the loom, the three chairs, and the table--
and showed him that Marner was not there.
Nothing at that moment could be much more inviting to Dunsey than
the bright fire on the brick hearth: he walked in and seated himself
by it at once. There was something in front of the fire, too, that
would have been inviting to a hungry man, if it had been in a
different stage of cooking. It was a small bit of pork suspended
from the kettle-hanger by a string passed through a large door-key,
in a way known to primitive housekeepers unpossessed of jacks. But
the pork had been hung at the farthest extremity of the hanger,
apparently to prevent the roasting from proceeding too rapidly
 Silas Marner |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Desert Gold by Zane Grey: you feel. An' if I'd had that one shot never in the world could
I have picked the Papago guide. I'd have had to kill Rojas. That's
the white man of it. But Yaqui was right. Only an Indian could
have done it. You can gamble the Papago alive meant slim chance
for us. Because he'd led straight to where Mercedes is hidden, an'
then we'd have left cover to fight it out...When you come to think
of the Yaqui's hate for Greasers, when you just seen him pass up
a shot at one--well, I don't know how to say what I mean, but
damn me, my som-brer-ro is off to the Indian!"
"I reckon so, an' I reckon the ball's opened," rejoined Lash, and
now that former nervous impatience so unnatural to him was as
 Desert Gold |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: right and wrong, we cannot be happy even by success, because we
cannot escape the consciousness of our fault; but if we miscarry,
the disappointment is irremediably embittered. How comfortless is
the sorrow of him who feels at once the pangs of guilt and the
vexation of calamity which guilt has brought upon him!
"Consider, Princess, what would have been your condition if the
Lady Pekuah had entreated to accompany you, and, being compelled to
stay in the tents, had been carried away; or how would you have
borne the thought if you had forced her into the Pyramid, and she
had died before you in agonies of terror?"
"Had either happened," said Nekayah, "I could not have endured life
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