| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Mistress Wilding by Rafael Sabatini: This gave confirmation to her thoughts. It wanted more than half an
hour to noon already. "Then he may return at any moment?" said she.
"At any moment, madam," was the grave reply.
She took her resolve. "I will wait," she announced, to the man's
increasing if undisplayed astonishment. "Let my horse be seen to."
He bowed his obedience, and she followed him - a slender, graceful
figure in her dove-coloured riding- habit laced with silver - across
the stone-flagged vestibule, through the cool gloom of the great hall,
into the spacious library of which he held the door.
"Mistress Horton is following me," she informed the butler. "Will you
bring her to me when she comes?"
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: just words, words -- they meant nothing in the world
to him, I might just as well have whistled. Words
realize nothing, vivify nothing to you, unless you have
suffered in your own person the thing which the words
try to describe. There are wise people who talk ever
so knowingly and complacently about "the working
classes," and satisfy themselves that a day's hard in-
tellectual work is very much harder than a day's hard
manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much bigger
pay. Why, they really think that, you know, because
they know all about the one, but haven't tried the
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Scenes from a Courtesan's Life by Honore de Balzac: somnambulist who, when awake, can press it only up to a certain
average of tightness, you will see that in the somnambulistic state--
as it is stupidly termed--his fingers can clutch like a vise screwed
up by a blacksmith.'--Well, monsieur, I placed my hand in that of a
woman, not asleep, for Bouvard rejects the word, but isolated, and
when the old man bid her squeeze my wrist as long and as tightly as
she could, I begged him to stop when the blood was almost bursting
from my finger tips. Look, you can see the marks of her clutch, which
I shall not lose for these three months."
"The deuce!" exclaimed Monsieur Gault, as he saw a band of bruised
flesh, looking like the scar of a burn.
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