Frances Mayes Quotes

• Frances Mayes / Poet

May summer last a hundred years.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

Memory is, of course, a trickster.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

Italy's siren call lures us more and more.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

The world cracks open for those willing to take a risk.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

The longer you are in a place, the more you get under its layers.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

Never lose your childish enthusiasm and things will come your way.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

In America, people are just so straightforward when they dislike things.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

It's kind of amazing that people will travel because of a book. I admire that.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

Venice, the most touristy place in the world, is still just completely magic to me.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

The Only Thing More Surprising Than the Chance She's Taking... Is Where It's Taking Her.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

The words 'forse che si,' 'forse che no', 'perhaps yes,' 'perhaps no,' repeat along all paths.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

After owning a pool, I think the best way to enjoy the water is to have a friend who has a pool.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

Indecision is a virus that can run through an army and destroy its will to win or even to survive.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

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 / Poet

I’ll always marvel at the liveliness of southern speech-so full of metaphor and hyperbole, quirks and vividness.

• Frances Mayes / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

One of those flash epiphanies of travel, the realization that worlds you'd love vibrantly exist outside your ignorance of them. The vitality of many lives you know nothing about. I could live in this town, so how is it that I've never been here before today?

• Frances Mayes / Poet

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.