| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: but I assured him he was wrong. He waited a moment longer, hoping I'd
begin a conversation, but I was too absorbed to be responsive, so he went
unwillingly home.
The evening had made me light-headed and happy; I think I walked into a
deep sleep as I entered my front door. So I didn't know whether or not
Gatsby went to Coney Island, or for how many hours he "glanced into
rooms." while his house blazed gaudily on. I called up Daisy from the
office next morning, and invited her to come to tea.
"Don't bring Tom," I warned her.
"What?"
"Don't bring Tom."
The Great Gatsby |
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: I never heard the sound of the great guns booming inland from the
Navy-yard without saying to myself, "The Wasp has come!" and almost
thinking I could see her, as she rolled in, crumpling the water
before her, weather-beaten, barnacled, with shattered spars and
threadbare canvas, welcomed by the shouts and tears of thousands.
This was one of those dreams that I nursed and never told. Let me
make a clean breast of it now, and say, that, so late as to have
outgrown childhood, perhaps to have got far on towards manhood,
when the roar of the cannon has struck suddenly on my ear, I have
started with a thrill of vague expectation and tremulous delight,
and the long-unspoken words have articulated themselves in the
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Talisman by Walter Scott: those beauties and his own wisdom. The last was not sufficient
to foresee this misfortune, the former seemed ineffectual to
prevent it. The eldest exceeded not her twentieth year, the
youngest had scarce attained her thirteenth; and so like were
they to each other that they could not have been distinguished
but for the difference of height, in which they gradually rose in
easy gradation above each other, like the ascent which leads to
the gates of Paradise. So lovely were these seven sisters when
they stood in the darksome vault, disrobed of all clothing saving
a cymar of white silk, that their charms moved the hearts of
those who were not mortal. Thunder muttered, the earth shook,
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