Zavanelli Quotes & Sayings

A story communicates fear, hope, and anxiety, and because we can feel it, we get the moral not just as a concept, but as a teaching of our hearts. That's the power of story. — Marshall Ganz

I can't get it out," she said.
"Just pull at it."
"It hurts. It's throbbing."
"Pull harder."
"I can't! It's truly stuck. I need something to make it slippery. Do you have some sort of lubricant nearby?"
"No."
"Not anything?"
"Much as it may surprise you, we've never needed lubricant in the library before now. — Lisa Kleypas

Every life is a canvas and every interaction is a brush, therefore we'd be wise to consider how we handle the paint. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Outside the basement door was a covered pen that housed a rooster and a seagull. The rooster had been on his way to Colonel Sanders' when he fell off a truck and broke a drumstick. Someone called Carol, as people often do, and she took the rooster into her care. He was hard of moving, but she had hopes for him. He was so new there he did not even have a name. The seagull, on the other hand, had been with her for years. He had one wing. She had picked him up on a beach three hundred miles away. His name was Garbage Belly. --John McPhee, Travels in Georgia (1973) — David Remnick

But, as a princess of Hell, I tended to lean toward the more dramatic - I did have a reputation to uphold after all. I threw a knife at my visiting mother's head. In my defense, it was only a butter knife - unfortunately - and I knew, even before I fired it with deadly intent, it would never make its target - an even bigger shame. — Eve Langlais

I do not just want you at your best.
I almost do not care
where your Happiness lives,
but please,
let me visit your pain?

Take me to the place
where your sadness goes,
and show me the tragedy
that no one knows. — Meraaqi

Children...wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride,; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well underway. — Annie Dillard

I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for ... Criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom. — Edward W. Said

You all set?" he asked, tossing me a pair of sunglasses.
"Wow, nice." I felt the frame, rubbing my finger over the lenses to wipe away a smudge. "Not bad, Phoenix."
"Twinkies." He slid his pair on and adjusted the gun across his chest. "Told you. Breakfast of champions."
- Skylla and Jet — Rachael Wade

The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what's being said before the writer figures out how to say it. — Joy Williams

The best thing about baseball is that you can do something about yesterday tomorrow. — Manny Trillo