My earlier blog post on quotation methods might have been a bit misleading. I didn't mean to suggest that all quotes have to be preceded by a colon. Another option is to lead in with a comma:

e.g. Elisa wants more out of life, but the Tinker tells her, "It's no life for a woman."

That's one way. Another one would be to simply put quotation marks around the exact words without any attribute phrases ("he said" and "She told him," for example). You could just make the quote a natural part of your sentence:

e.g. While Elisa wants more out of her life, the travelling supposedly offers "no life for a woman."

The one thing you shouldn't do is the hanging quote, as I've often talked about. Don't just throw the complete quote, wrapped in quotation marks in the middle of a paragraph, a sentence all by itself. You should always lead in to it.

Hope this clarifies things a bit. The example I gave previously was for a specific circumstance, but I didn't take the time (because I didn't have the time) to give other examples because, frankly, the option regarding the colon is often the easiest and, usually, ignored one.

Good luck on the essays this coming Friday. Before then I'll be posting at least twice more on how to write about poetry. Stay tuned.

GC