Frances Mayes Quotes

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.

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

[As Garibaldi says,] 'Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them ...

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

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.

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

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

But, really, such an uprooting is instinctual. Time to rebel. Internal gears began to grind, propelling you forward - then you invent the reasons. My

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Outrageous flowers swagging off balconies like bright skirts of ballgowns ...

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.

Do you know the most surprising thing about divorce? It doesn't actually kill you. Like a bullet to the heart or a head-on car wreck. It should. When someone you've promised to cherish till death do you part says "I never loved you," it should kill you instantly. You shouldn't have to wake up day after day after that, trying to understand how in the world you didn't know. The light just never went on, you know. I must have known, of course, but I was too scared to see the truth. Then fear just makes you so stupid.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

Whatever a guidebook says, wether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of the place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct.

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.

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.

I'm mixed on figs. The fleshy quality feels spooky. In Italian, il fico, fig, has a slangy turn into la fica, meaning vulva. Possibly because of the famous fig leaf exodus from Eden, it seems like the most ancient of fruits. Oddest, too - the fig flower is inside the fruit. To pull one open is to look into a complex, primitive, infinitely sophisticated life cycle tableau.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Memory is, of course, a trickster.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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)

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

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.

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.

Look if you like but you will have to leap. Yes, I've always known that; I just didn't know that I knew.

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.

Italy's siren call lures us more and more.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Growing up in Fitzgerald, I lived in an intense microcosm, where your neighbor knows what you're going to do even before you do, where you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking. What is said, what is left to the imagination, what is denied, withheld, exaggerated-all these secretive, inverted things informed my childhood. Writing the stories that I found in the box, I remember being particularly fascinated by secrets kept in order to protect someone from who you are. That protection, sharpest knife in the drawer, I absorbed as naturally as a southern accent. At that time, I was curious to hold up to the light glimpses of the family that I had so efficiently fled. We were remote-back behind nowhere-when I was growing up, but even so, enormous social change was about to crumble foundations. Who were we, way far South? "We're south of everywhere," my mother used to lament.

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

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.

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.

In my notboredom but lack of available activity, I eavesdrop from their closet, hunching down among the Capezios and crinolines piled on the floor.

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

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.

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.

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

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