Frances Mayes Quotes
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After owning a pool, I think the best way to enjoy the water is to have a friend who has a pool.
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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.
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Venice, the most touristy place in the world, is still just completely magic to me.
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I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.
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A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.
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The words 'forse che si,' 'forse che no', 'perhaps yes,' 'perhaps no,' repeat along all paths.
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There is no technique, there is just the way to do it. Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?
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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?
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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.
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May summer last a hundred years.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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The longer you are in a place, the more you get under its layers.
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I’ll always marvel at the liveliness of southern speech-so full of metaphor and hyperbole, quirks and vividness.
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Memory is, of course, a trickster.
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Italy's siren call lures us more and more.
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Whatever a guidebook says, wether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of the place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.
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The world cracks open for those willing to take a risk.
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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.
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Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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