| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Scarecrow of Oz by L. Frank Baum: He gave chase to it and followed it a long way. When
finally he paused to look around him, Button-Bright could
see no sign of Pon's house, nor had he the slightest idea
in which direction it lay.
"Well, I'm lost again," he remarked to himself. "But
never mind; I've been lost lots of times. Someone is sure
to find me."
Trot was a little worried about Button-Bright when she
awoke and found him gone. Knowing how careless he was,
she believed that he had strayed away, but felt that he
would come back in time, because he had a habit of not
 The Scarecrow of Oz |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: both, the merit of the reconciliation was entirely Fleeming's.
When our intimacy first began, coldly enough, accidentally enough
on his part, he had still something of the Puritan, something of
the inhuman narrowness of the good youth. It fell from him slowly,
year by year, as he continued to ripen, and grow milder, and
understand more generously the mingled characters of men. In the
early days he once read me a bitter lecture; and I remember leaving
his house in a fine spring afternoon, with the physical darkness of
despair upon my eyesight. Long after he made me a formal
retractation of the sermon and a formal apology for the pain he had
inflicted; adding drolly, but truly, 'You see, at that time I was
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) by Dante Alighieri: O Saul! how fallen upon thy proper sword
Didst thou appear there lifeless in Gilboa,
That felt thereafter neither rain nor dew!
O mad Arachne! so I thee beheld
E'en then half spider, sad upon the shreds
Of fabric wrought in evil hour for thee!
O Rehoboam! no more seems to threaten
Thine image there; but full of consternation
A chariot bears it off, when none pursues!
Displayed moreo'er the adamantine pavement
How unto his own mother made Alcmaeon
 The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) |