Top 91 Frances Mayes Quotes
#1. Although I am a person who expected to be rooted in one spot forever, as it has turned out I love having the memories of living in many places.
Frances Mayes
#2. But, really, such an uprooting is instinctual. Time to rebel. Internal gears began to grind, propelling you forward - then you invent the reasons. My
Frances Mayes
#3. Splendid to arrive alone in a foreign country and feel the assault of difference. Here they are all along, busy with living; they don't talk or look like me. The rhythm of their day is entirely different; I am foreign.
Frances Mayes
#4. Venice, the most touristy place in the world, is still just completely magic to me.
Frances Mayes
#5. Neither my sisters, who were nowhere near, nor I knew depression; we knew bad mood. We didn't know drinking as disease, but as character flaw. Weakness. We didn't know "dysfunctional," but we lived it. We knew that if you were miserable, you brought it on yourself. She taught us.
Frances Mayes
#6. Going to Europe as a budding cook opened my eyes to food in a different way. When I got to Italy, the first thing I did was put my little basil plants in the ground and watch them turn into big, healthy bushes.
Frances Mayes
#7. I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.
Frances Mayes
#8. Vicki shines with intelligence as brightly as with beauty, a clear open face, black eyes, and a smile that makes you see what she looked like as a nine-year-old.
Frances Mayes
#9. If I lived here, ... I have a feeling this place would take me.
Frances Mayes
#10. What is life but this? Choices made early in a relationship determine the course.
Frances Mayes
#11. My idea of heaven still is to drive the gravel farm roads of Umbria and Tuscany, very pleasantly lost.
Frances Mayes
#12. Writing a poem doubles, triples the experience or connection that initiated it.
Frances Mayes
#13. The house protects the dreamer; the houses that are important to us are the ones that allow us to dream in peace. Guests we've had stop in for a night or two all come down the first morning, ready to tell their dreams.
Frances Mayes
#14. Martin Buber said, 'All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.
Frances Mayes
#15. Life offers you a thousand chances ... all you have to do is take one.
Frances Mayes
#16. Had his own way of praying, he had said; that old excuse. As if we were meant to be solitary. As if the church were not about holding the community together, as this sinful one needed.
Frances Mayes
#17. I'll always marvel at the liveliness of southern speech-so full of metaphor and hyperbole, quirks and vividness.
Frances Mayes
#18. Where is it written that houses must be beige? Any dun colored house would look better if painted pineapple, cream, ochre, or even a smart sage.
Frances Mayes
#19. Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world.
Frances Mayes
#20. Even gelato, which used to be divine all over Italy, is not dependably good anymore.
Frances Mayes
#21. Whatever a guidebook says, wether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of the place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct.
Frances Mayes
#22. Living in a small Italian hilltown, and having lived in a small town in south Georgia, I understand that you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking.
Frances Mayes
#23. A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.
Frances Mayes
#24. If you've got a plot the size of a car or a tiny yard in Italy, you're going to be growing tomatoes and basil and celery and carrots, and everybody is still connected to the land.
Frances Mayes
#25. No one can teach anyone to be a great anything. If your blood is on fire with the love of language and the desire to make something with words, you probably know that.
Frances Mayes
#26. Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. May summer last a hundred years.
Frances Mayes
#27. I was born and grew up in Fitzgerald, way down in south Georgia. It was a mill town and my family ran the cotton mill. My grandfather was mayor many times and my family felt deeply rooted to that spot.
Frances Mayes
#28. The undulent landscape looks serene in every direction. Honey-colored farmhouses, gently placed in hollows, rise like thick loaves of bread set out to cool.
Frances Mayes
#29. And feigned innocence, the vise that keeps women "girls" well into their sixties.
Frances Mayes
#30. When I was twelve, I started reading Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee, and - do we dare breathe the name - William Faulkner.
Frances Mayes
#31. Falling in love with a book brings the same catapulting madness and zest that falling in love with a person brings.
Frances Mayes
#32. We were given one country and we've set up in another.
Frances Mayes
#33. Oh, come on, he was twenty-six. And he had poetry on his lips.
Frances Mayes
#34. He said he couldn't understand a world 'shameless and cruel enough to divide its people by color when color is in fact the sign of God's artistic genius.
Frances Mayes
#35. Now I find the stack of chapters I called Under Magnolia. Why, after many years, even open these flowered folders? Dare alla luce, the Tuscans say at the birth of a baby, to give to the light.
Frances Mayes
#36. Where you are is who you are. The further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it. Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave.
Frances Mayes
#37. He's already tan, and leaning on the rail in his yellow linen shirt, with the pure glory of Venice racing behind him, I think he looks like someone I'd like to run off with, if I already hadn't.
Frances Mayes
#38. The world cracks open for those willing to take a risk.
Frances Mayes
#39. I never saw the necessity to attend all those classes, so many days a week, or purchase unreadable texts when so much fiction and poetry waited in the bookstore.
Frances Mayes
#40. We are walking on the foundations of literature, up the steep, stony path in the fiery heat.
Frances Mayes
#41. [As Garibaldi says,] 'Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them ...
Frances Mayes
#42. The wife Estelle's stone sinks to the right. The dead here seem really dead, and bone lonely, unlike the graves in Italian cemeteries, bedecked with fresh flowers, red votive lights, and photos of the deceased.
Frances Mayes
#43. I loved every place I lived and traveled. London, Paris, Rome, Venice. I fell hard for Central America and Mexico. In each country, I had fantasies that I could live there.
Frances Mayes
#44. Behind sunglasses we linger over espresso, talking about pizza as an art form, the geekiness of people's travel clothes ...
Frances Mayes
#45. The longer you are in a place, the more you get under its layers.
Frances Mayes
#46. It's kind of amazing that people will travel because of a book. I admire that.
Frances Mayes
#47. And my mother, whose radius of travel was short, tied the letters with ribbon and kept them in her desk, When you get the chance, she said to me, go.
Frances Mayes
#48. Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.
Frances Mayes
#49. As they clean the walls with wet cloths and sponges, they uncover the earlier paints, most prevalent a stark blue that must have been inspired by Mary's blue robes. Renaissance painters could get that rare color only from ground lapis lazuli brought from quarries in what is now Afghanistan.
Frances Mayes
#50. All afternoon in the deck chair, I try to describe to my notebook the colors of the water and sky. How to translate sunlight into words?
Frances Mayes
#51. I'm just fascinated by houses. In another life, I'd have probably trained as an architect. If I had enough money, I'd collect them like other people collect teapots. I don't know why I love them so much. I'm just very interested in the idea of a house as a metaphor for the way one lives.
Frances Mayes
#52. I'm reading more than ever. I've started on the left wall of the Carnegie Library and plan to read my way around the room.
Frances Mayes
#53. What a strange mind, to cover the real thing with an imitation of something real.
Frances Mayes
#54. The Only Thing More Surprising Than the Chance She's Taking ... Is Where It's Taking Her!
Frances Mayes
#55. One habit: choosing a book and starting each day with a dedicated time of reading and gazing, becoming an apprentice to a mind I admire.
Frances Mayes
#56. There is no technique, there is just the way to do it.
Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?
Frances Mayes
#58. Anytime the perfume of orange and lemon groves wafts in the window; the human body has to feel suffused with a languorous well-being.
Frances Mayes
#59. The Dream Lover-what a bold, insightful, and enticing novel. And how vigorously Elizabeth Berg brings us the iconoclastic life of George Sand. Berg writes with such intimacy and compassion that I think she must have some shared ancestral DNA with Sand. I savored every page.
Frances Mayes
#60. It is not 2006 all over the world. So who are you in a place where 1950 or 1920 is about to arrive?
Frances Mayes
#61. I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language - a happiness we were born to have.
Frances Mayes
#62. Daddy Jack and Fanny don't care what I do as long as I stay out of the kitchen. She looms over the stove, madly coating everything she cooks with cayenne pepper and several shakes of Tabasco.
Frances Mayes
#63. [As Chevalley says,] 'Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect ...
Frances Mayes
#64. Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.
Frances Mayes
#65. The urge to travel feels magnetic. Two of my favorite words are linked: departure time. And travel whets the emotions, turns upside down the memory bank, and the golden coins scatter.
Frances Mayes
#66. In America, people are just so straightforward when they dislike things.
Frances Mayes
#67. In my notboredom but lack of available activity, I eavesdrop from their closet, hunching down among the Capezios and crinolines piled on the floor.
Frances Mayes
#68. What has impressed me the most about the Italians whose tables we've sat at is that they are traditional cooks but also outrageously innovative. These people are wild improvisers.
Frances Mayes
#69. Always, I liked the infinitive 'to go.' Let's go, let's go. let's really go. 'Andare' was the first verb I learned to conjugate in Italian. 'Andiamo,' let's go, teh sound comes out at a gallop.
Frances Mayes
#70. When my husband is away and I'm by myself, my neighbours will insist I eat with them every single night because they see it as unhealthy to eat by yourself.
Frances Mayes
#71. Instead of winding and skirting, Roman roads tend to go straight to the top. The chariots were light and the shortest distance between two points seemed to have governed their surveyors. I've read that some of their roadbeds go down twelve feet.
Frances Mayes
#72. And, I think, for those of us who came of age with the women's movement, there's always the fear that it's not real, you're not really allowed to determine your own life. It may be pulled back at any moment.
Frances Mayes
#73. The bricked-up fourteenth-century "doors of the dead" are still visible. These ghosts of doors beside the main entrance were designed, some say, to take out the plague victims - bad luck for them to exit by the main entrance. I notice in the regular doors, people often leave their keys in the lock.
Frances Mayes
#74. As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.
Frances Mayes
#75. I think I went to Italy initially for the art, architecture, food and history, but I stayed there because of the people in Cortona.
Frances Mayes
#76. After owning a pool, I think the best way to enjoy the water is to have a friend who has a pool.
Frances Mayes
#77. There are reasons we congregate in these hot spots- to worship beauty and to feel its effects light up the electrolytes in the bloodstream.
Frances Mayes
#78. The Italians have their priorities right: They're driven, they do their work, but they really enjoy the day-to-day and they don't put off the enjoyment of the everyday for some future goal.
Frances Mayes
#79. Although he's slight, he has that wiry strength that seems to come more from will than muscle.
Frances Mayes
#80. I find that other countries have this or this, but Italy is the only one that has it all for me. The culture, the cuisine, the people, the landscape, the history. Just everything to me comes together there.
Frances Mayes
#81. Often, seemingly spontaneous acts come from a deep, unacknowledged place, and a sudden decision feels inevitable and right.
Frances Mayes
#82. There is so much jasmine and nightshade in the garden that we all wake with lyrical headaches.
Frances Mayes
#83. Look if you like but you will have to leap. Yes, I've always known that; I just didn't know that I knew.
Frances Mayes
#84. Outrageous flowers swagging off balconies like bright skirts of ballgowns ...
Frances Mayes
#85. The words 'forse che si,' 'forse che no', 'perhaps yes,' 'perhaps no,' repeat along all paths.
Frances Mayes
#86. Images are the pegs holding down memory's billowing tent.
Frances Mayes
#87. I got the idea that to write books would be the best way to spend a life. I never thought of anything else that seemed like half as much fun, although in my next life I would like to be an architect, too, so I can have an easier time restoring houses.
Frances Mayes
#88. It's daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.
Frances Mayes
#89. Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.
Frances Mayes
#90. They all agree, Italy is not what it used to be. What is? All my adult life I've heard how Silicon Valley used to be all orchards, how Atlanta used to be genteel, how publishing used to be run by gentlemen, how houses used to cost what a car costs now. All true, but what can you do but live now?
Frances Mayes
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