| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson: due proportion of small children. Two final guests were to
arrive that day, bringing the latest breath of Europe on their
wings,--Philip Malbone, Hope's betrothed; and little Emilia,
Hope's half-sister.
None of the family had seen Emilia since her wandering mother
had taken her abroad, a fascinating spoiled child of four, and
they were all eager to see in how many ways the succeeding
twelve years had completed or corrected the spoiling. As for
Philip, he had been spoiled, as Aunt Jane declared, from the
day of his birth, by the joint effort of all friends and
neighbors. Everybody had conspired to carry on the process
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with
their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives, which were people.
Mrs Ramsay rose. Lily rose. Mrs Ramsay went. For days there hung about
her, as after a dream some subtle change is felt in the person one has
dreamt of, more vividly than anything she said, the sound of murmuring
and, as she sat in the wicker arm-chair in the drawing-room window she
wore, to Lily's eyes, an august shape; the shape of a dome.
This ray passed level with Mr Bankes's ray straight to Mrs Ramsay sitting
reading there with James at her knee. But now while she still looked,
Mr Bankes had done. He had put on his spectacles. He had stepped back.
He had raised his hand. He had slightly narrowed his clear blue eyes,
 To the Lighthouse |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: the passage of a shadow above the firmament of gray clouds, filters
down upon the ship. Now and then the rain pours upon your head in
streams as if from spouts. It seems as if your ship were going to
be drowned before she sank, as if all atmosphere had turned to
water. You gasp, you splutter, you are blinded and deafened, you
are submerged, obliterated, dissolved, annihilated, streaming all
over as if your limbs, too, had turned to water. And every nerve
on the alert you watch for the clearing-up mood of the Western
King, that shall come with a shift of wind as likely as not to whip
all the three masts out of your ship in the twinkling of an eye.
XXVII.
 The Mirror of the Sea |