Zebra Line Quotes

There’s cat feces in my Batman costume, and all the lines in my screenplay were snorted by the neighborhood cokehead. Ah, but that’s life, no?

From my chair I had a clear view of Hobie’s Noah’s Ark: paired elephants, zebras, carven beasts marching two by two, clear down to tiny hen and rooster and the bunnies and mice bringing up the rear. And the memory was located there, beyond words, a coded message from that first afternoon: rain streaming down the skylights, the homely file of creatures lined on the kitchen counter waiting to be saved. Noah: the great conservator, the great caretaker. “And—” he’d gotten up to make some coffee—“I

The neighborhood of Indian Village lay just twelve blocks west of Hurlbut, but it was a different world altogether. The four grand streets of Burns, Iroquois, Seminole, and Adams (even in Indian Village the White Man had taken half the names) were lined with stately houses built in eclectic styles. Red-brick Georgian rose next to English Tudor, which gave onto French Provincial. The houses in Indian Village had big yards, important walkways, picturesquely oxidizing cupolas, lawn jockeys (whose days were numbered), and burglar alarms (whose popularity was only just beginning). My grandfather remained silent, however, as he toured his son’s impressive new home. “How do you like the size of this living room?” Milton was asking him. “Here, sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Tessie and I want you and Ma to feel like this is your house, too. Now that you’re retired—” “What do you mean retired?” “Okay, semiretired. Now that you can take it a little bit easy, you’ll be able to do all the things you always wanted to do. Look, in here’s the library. You want to come over and work on your translations, you can do it right here. How about that table? Big enough for you? And the shelves are built right into the wall.” Pushed out of the daily operations at the Zebra Room, my grandfather began to spend his days driving around the city. He drove downtown to the Public Library to read the foreign newspapers. Afterward, he stopped to play backgammon at a coffee house in Greektown. At fifty-four, Lefty Stephanides was still in good shape. He walked three miles a day for exercise. He ate sensibly and had less of a belly than his son. Nevertheless

Mom hustled Adam, Thomas, Kat and me into the minivan. We spent ten minutes driving down Southern State Highway before we pulled up in front of my grandparents’ impressive, white Victorian home. Engraved columns hovered around the garden on the side of the house and the lawn was zebra striped from a fresh cut; it meant Grandpa was expecting us. He was nowhere to be seen, but if I had to guess he was probably in the backyard skimming the swimming pool. Oak trees that lined the property kept him busy during the fall and summer months between his weekly pool and grass preservations.

Illiterates, abecedarians, elitists, rodents all—I will tell you this: I, Zebra, born Bibi Abbas Abbas Hosseini on a scorching August day in 1982, am a descendent of a long line of self-taught men who repeatedly abandoned their capital, Tehran, where blood has been washed with blood for a hundred years, to take refuge in Nowshaht, in the languid, damp regions of Mazandaran.

Expertise is about qualification and experience. Excellence is about quality of mind and awareness. Where expertise fails, the quest for excellence begins. Excellence often begins with examination of our own minds. Professional excellence is a result of developing a quality mind through constant awareness. Experts tend to think of themselves as those who have finally reached their goal. Those in pursuit of excellence are always beginners. Excellence is a journey without a finish line. It begins every day with a new awakening and a new insight that enriches the mind. Come, let’s begin!

In 2012, when Amanda Melin, a scientist who studies animal vision, met Tim Caro, a scientist who studies animal patterns, their conversation naturally turned to zebras. Caro had become the latest in a long line of biologists to wonder why zebras have such conspicuous black-and-white patterns. One of the earliest and most prominent hypotheses, he told Melin, was that the stripes counterintuitively act as camouflage. They mess with the eyes of predators like lions and hyenas by breaking up the zebra’s outline, or by helping it to blend in among the vertical trunks of trees, or by causing a confusing blur when it runs. Melin was dubious. “I had a look on my face,” she recalls. “I said, ‘I think most of the carnivores are hunting at night, and their visual acuity is going to be so much worse than humans’. They probably can’t see the stripes.’ And Tim went, ‘What?’ ” Humans outshine almost every other animal at resolving detail. Our exceptionally sharp vision, Melin realized, gives us a rarefied view of a zebra’s stripes. She and Caro calculated that on a bright day, people with excellent eyesight can distinguish the black-and-white bands from 200 yards away. Lions can only do so at 90 yards and hyenas at 50 yards. And those distances roughly halve at dawn and dusk, when these predators are more likely to hunt. Melin was right: The stripes can’t possibly act as camouflage because predators can only make them out at close range, by which point they can almost certainly hear and smell the zebra. At most distances, the stripes would just fuse together into a uniform gray. To a hunting lion, a zebra mostly looks like a donkey.[*10]

They’re shrinks. You said so yourself. They overcomplicate things. If you hear hoof beats, you look for horses, not zebras.

Because of this genuine love for horses, the beautiful wild-horse panorama beneath Pan swelled his heart. He gazed and gazed. From near to far the bands dotted the green-gray valley. Far away this valley floor shaded into blue. Near at hand the colors were easily distinguishable. Blacks and bays, whites and chestnuts, pintos that resembled zebras dotted this wild pasture land. The closest band to where Pan and Blinky stood could not have been more than a mile distant, in a straight line. A shiny black stallion was the leader of this herd. He was acting strangely, too, trotting forward and halting, tossing his head and long black mane.

If you hear hoof beats, you look for horses, not zebras.

If anything's to be praised, it's most likely how the west wind becomes the east wind, when a frozen bough sways leftward, voicing its creaking protests, and your cough flies across the Great Plains to Dakota's forests. At noon, shouldering a shotgun, fire at what may well be a rabbit in snowfields, so that a shell widens the breach between the pen that puts up these limping awkward lines and the creature leaving real tracks in the white. On occasion the head combines its existence with that of a hand, not to fetch more lines but to cup an ear under the pouring slur of their common voice. Like a new centaur. There is always a possibility left to let yourself out to the street whose brown length will soothe the eye with doorways, the slender forking of willows, the patchwork puddles, with simply walking. The hair on my gourd is stirred by a breeze and the street, in distance, tapering to a V, is like a face to a chin; and a barking puppy flies out of a gateway like crumpled paper. A street. Some houses, let's say, are better than others. To take one item, some have richer windows. What's more, if you go insane, it won't happen, at least, inside them. ... and when 'the future' is uttered, swarms of mice rush out of the Russian language and gnaw a piece of ripened memory which is twice as hole-ridden as real cheese. After all these years it hardly matters who or what stands in the corner, hidden by heavy drapes, and your mind resounds not with a seraphic 'do', only their rustle. Life, that no one dares to appraise, like that gift horse's mouth, bares its teeth in a grin at each encounter. What gets left of a man amounts to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech. Not that I am losing my grip; I am just tired of summer. You reach for a shirt in a drawer and the day is wasted. If only winter were here for snow to smother all these streets, these humans; but first, the blasted green. I would sleep in my clothes or just pluck a borrowed book, while what's left of the year's slack rhythm, like a dog abandoning its blind owner, crosses the road at the usual zebra. Freedom is when you forget the spelling of the tyrant's name and your mouth's saliva is sweeter than Persian pie, and though your brain is wrung tight as the horn of a ram nothing drops from your pale-blue eye.