Quotes by 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.”

“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 p...”

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

“You never know, of course, when you write a book what its fate will be. Sink out of sight, soar to the sunwho knows. I love this quote from Frances Mayes. It pretty much sums up the Great Unknown o...”

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

“There are reasons we congregate in these hot spots- to worship beauty and to feel its effects light up the electrolytes in the bloodstream.”

“What is life but this? Choices made early in a relationship determine the course.”

“Images are the pegs holding down memory's billowing tent.”

“It is not 2006 all over the world. So who are you in a place where 1950 or 1920 is about to arrive?”

“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.”

“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.”

“Its daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.”

“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.”

“There is no technique, there is just the way to do it.Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?”

“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.”

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

“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 can...”

“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 kn...”

“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.”

“I think I went to Italy initially for the art, architecture, food and history, but I stayed there because of the people in Cortona.”