Frances Mayes Quotes & Sayings

What a strange mind, to cover the real thing with an imitation of something real. — Frances Mayes

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

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

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

A lifelong insomniac, I sleep like one newly dead every night and dream deeply harmonious dreams of swimming along with the current in a clear green river, playing and at home in the water. On the first night, I dreamed that the real name of the house was not Bramasole but Cento Angeli, One Hundred Angels, and that I would discover them one by one. Is it bad luck to change the name of a house, as it is to rename a boat? As a trepid foreigner, I wouldn't. But for me, the house now has a secret name as well as its own name. — Frances Mayes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. The breeze lifting a blue curtain in a doorway billows just the same whether you are lucky enough to observe it or not. Travel gives such jolts. I could live in this town, so how is it that I've never been here before today? — Frances Mayes

We are walking on the foundations of literature, up the steep, stony path in the fiery heat. — Frances Mayes

He's delighted to read what the mayor of Naples says about driving there. Naples is the most chaotic city for drivers on earth. Ed loved it - he got to drive on the sidewalk while the pedestrians filled the street. "A green light is a green light, avanti, avanti," the mayor explained. "A red light - just a suggestion." And yellow? he was asked. "Yellow is for gaiety. — Frances Mayes

What is life but this? Choices made early in a relationship determine the course. — Frances Mayes

My idea of heaven still is to drive the gravel farm roads of Umbria and Tuscany, very pleasantly lost. — Frances Mayes

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

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

Like fanning through a deck of cards, my mind flashes on the thousand chances, trivial to profound, that converged to re-create this place. Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different. Where did the expression "a place in the sun" first come from? My rational thought process cling always to the idea of free will, random event; my blood, however, streams easily along a current of fate. — Frances Mayes

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

Martin Buber said, 'All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware. — Frances Mayes

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

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

Oh, come on, he was twenty-six. And he had poetry on his lips. — Frances Mayes

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

At Bramasole, the first secret spot that draws me outside is a stump and board bench on a high terrace overlooking the lake and valley. Before I sit down, I must bang the board against a tree to knock off all the ants. Then I'm happy. With a stunted oak tree for shelter and a never-ending view, I am hidden. No one knows where I am. The nine-year-old's thrill of the hideout under the hydrangea comes back: My mother is calling me and I am not answering. — Frances Mayes

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

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

Everything I pick up seems to lure me away. Everything I do in my daily life begins to feel like striking wet matches. The need to travel is a mysterious force. A desire to 'go' runs through me equally with an intense desire to 'stay' at home. An equal and opposite thermodynamic principle. When I travel, I think of home and what it means. At home I'm dreaming of catching trains at night in the gray light of Old Europe, or pushing open shutters to see Florence awaken. The balance just slightly tips in the direction of the airport. — Frances Mayes

The queen bee's life is totally overrated. All she does is lay eggs, lay eggs. She takes one nuptial flight. That one stuns her with enough fertile power to be trapped in the hive forever. The workers - the sexually undeveloped females - have the best life. They have fields of flowers to roll in. Imagine turning over and over inside a rose. — Frances Mayes

There is so much jasmine and nightshade in the garden that we all wake with lyrical headaches. — Frances Mayes

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

[As Chevalley says,] 'Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect ... — Frances Mayes

[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

Even gelato, which used to be divine all over Italy, is not dependably good anymore. — Frances Mayes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Often, seemingly spontaneous acts come from a deep, unacknowledged place, and a sudden decision feels inevitable and right. — Frances Mayes

Images are the pegs holding down memory's billowing tent. — Frances Mayes

Outrageous flowers swagging off balconies like bright skirts of ballgowns ... — Frances Mayes

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

But the essence of a place, the part of it that picks you up and puts you down somewhere else, cannot be given to the reader through factual description. And maybe not at all. You have to find your own secret images. The slow fall of a coin into the gorge with the sun catching the copper only for a moment, and the fall into nothing says more about a sense of place than three pages of restaurant and hotel descriptions ... — Frances Mayes

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

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

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

Italy's siren call lures us more and more. — Frances Mayes

First memory: a man at the back door is saying, I have real bad news, sweat is dripping off his face, Garbert's been shot, noise from my mother, I run to her room behind her, I'm jumping on the canopied bed while she cries, she's pulling out drawers looking for a handkerchief, Now, he's all right, the man say, they think, patting her shoulder, I'm jumping higher, I'm not allowed, they think he saved old man Mayes, the bed slats dislodge and the mattress collapses. My mother lunges for me.
Many traveled to Reidsville for the event, but my family did not witness Willis Barnes's electrocution, From kindergarten through high school, Donette, the murderer's daughter, was in my class. We played together at recess. Sometimes she'd spit on me. — Frances Mayes

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

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

We feel prepared to face the reality of restoration. We walk into town for coffee and telephone Piero Rizzatti, the geometra. The translations "draftsman" or "surveyor" don't quite explain what a geometra is, a professional without an equivalent in the United States - a liaison among owner, builders, and town planning officials. Ian has assured us that he is the best in the area, meaning also that he has the best connections and can get the permits quickly. — Frances Mayes

Writing a poem doubles, triples the experience or connection that initiated it. — Frances Mayes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally I caught on that what you buy today is ready - picked or dug this morning at its peak. This also explained another puzzle; I never understood why Italian refrigerators are so minute until I realized that they don't store food the way we do. The Sub-Zero giant I have at home begins to seem almost institutional compared to the toy fridge I now have here. — Frances Mayes

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

We were given one country and we've set up in another. — Frances Mayes

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

Falling in love with a book brings the same catapulting madness and zest that falling in love with a person brings. — Frances Mayes

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

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

Although he's slight, he has that wiry strength that seems to come more from will than muscle. — Frances Mayes

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

And feigned innocence, the vise that keeps women "girls" well into their sixties. — Frances Mayes

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

Memory is, of course, a trickster. — Frances Mayes

If I lived here, ... I have a feeling this place would take me. — Frances Mayes

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

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

As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward. — Frances Mayes

Stone houses, terrace walls, city walls, streets. Plant any rose and you hit four or five big ones. All the Etruscan sarcophagi with likenesses of the dead carved on top in realistic, living poses must have come out of the most natural transference into death they could imagine. After lifetimes of dealing with stone, why not, in death, turn into it? — Frances Mayes

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

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

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

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

Behind sunglasses we linger over espresso, talking about pizza as an art form, the geekiness of people's travel clothes ... — Frances Mayes

Travel releases spontaneity. You become a godlike creature full or choice, free to visit the stately pleasure domes, make love in the morning, sketch a bell tower, read a history of Byzantium, stare for one hour at the face of Leonardo da Vinci's 'Madonna dei fusi.' You open, as in childhood, and
for a time
receive this world. There's visceral aspect, too
the huntress who is free. Free to go, free to return home bringing memories to lay on the hearth. — Frances Mayes

At a few times in my life, I've not been aware that I've just stepped onto a large X. Change might not be on my mind. Why change? I've always admired lives that flourish in place. The taproot reaches all the way to the aquifer, the leaves bud, flourish, fall, and grow again. I like generations following one another in the same house, where lamplight falls through the windows in squares of light on the snow, and somebody's height chart still marks the kitchen doorway. But there I stand on the X, not knowing it's time to leap, when, really, I'd only meant to pause. — Frances Mayes

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

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

Memory is capricious. I can look back and see decadence, old bigots, the constant racial slurs, the bores, the wild cards, the bighearted, the family album of alcoholics, the saints, the old aunt propped in a chair saying only "da-da," the slow-motion suicides, but at four, six, ten, they loomed, powerful, not as types but as themselves. Among them, logic takes wing." (pg. 31) — Frances Mayes