Frances Mayes Quotes

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

[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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Frances Mayes

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. ~ 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

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

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

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. ~ 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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memory is, of course, a trickster. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Italy's siren call lures us more and more. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Frances Mayes

Every step she took seemed to show her a new danger. Talking to strangers could kill her. Failing to remember table etiquette could kill her. Ignorance could kill her. And now it seemed that stepping outside the tasters' chambers for a stroll could kill her. ~ Frances Hardinge

I think every single American believes they have a right to clean air and clean water. ~ Frances Beinecke

I do not know whether many people realize how much more than is ever written there really is in a story - how many parts of it are never told - how much more really happened than there is in the book one holds in one's hand and pores over. ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

Sometimes the nicest people are the ones who've been hurt the most ~ Frances Ivy

Each country has a soul, and France's soul is equality. ~ Francois Hollande

Beneath and around the dead and ruined chaparral rise the most amazingly beautiful flowers. Tulips and wind poppies and flame poppies, whispering bells and suncups. These are flowers that grow only after a burn. Only in a land once dead. You never see them otherwise

When my eyes closed I can see those flowers now. They are a promise: that the land will regrow, that even after a disaster life continues, that wonders abound. k ~ Frances Wood

The youngest youngster vibrates with the shock of cannon firing, even though the sound may not be near enough to be heard," answered Coombe. "We're all vibrating unconsciously. We are shuddering consciously at the things we hear and are mad to put a stop to, before they go further. ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

It feels like when I write, it's intuitive. This is true of Frances, and it's true of this [The Funniest Movie Of The Summer]. ~ Greta Gerwig

I'm growing fatter," said Mary, ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

I would have had a dad. And that would have been an incredible experience. ~ Frances Bean Cobain

The door might not be opened to a woman again for a long, long time, and I had a kind of duty to other women to walk in and sit down on the chair that was offered, and so establish the right of others long hence and far distant in geography to sit in the high seats. ~ Frances Perkins

People know that pursuing a mission without achieving results is dispiriting; achieving results without a mission is meaningless. ~ Frances Hesselbein

Stigma takes many forms, comes from all directions, is sometimes blatantly overt, but can also be remarkably subtle. It is the cruel comment, the unkind smirk, the extrusion from the group, the lost job opportunity, the rejected marriage proposal, the ineligibility for life insurance, the inability to adopt a child or pilot a plane.

But it is also the reduced expectation, the helping hand when none is needed or wanted, the solicitous sympathy that one cannot really be expected to measure up.

And the secondary psychological and practical harms of having a mental disorder come only partly from how others see you. A great deal of the trouble comes from the change in how you see yourself: the sense of being damaged goods, feeling not normal or worthy, not a full fledged member of the group.

It is bad enough that stigma is so often associated with having a mental disorder, but the stigma that comes from being mislabeled with a fake diagnosis is a dead loss with absolutely no redeeming features. ~ Allen Frances

My will shall be done regardless of the flaws in thy life, if ye count upon the power of My righteousness. I do not work only in cases where there are no obstacles; but I glory in over-ruling the prevailing circumstances, and I take pleasure in bringing victories in those places where no victory is anywhere in sight. ~ Frances J Roberts

For a second, she could almost see Caverna as the Kleptomancer did, a murky, monstrous beauty, smiling her fine-fanged smile as she prepared to stretch and grow, shaking out her tunnel-tresses as they became longer and longer. Perhaps Caverna had already known that such an opportunity was open to her. Neverfell imagined her discarding the Grand Steward like a worn-out toy, and reaching for a new favourite, a man who could extend her empire and bring her new strength ... Maxim Childersin. ~ Frances Hardinge

We are on red alert when it comes to how we are perceiving ourselves as a species. There's no desire to be an adult. Adulthood is not a goal. It's not seen as a gift. ~ Frances McDormand

I would keep my focus on the Lord, no matter what. ~ Frances Newton

They understood something together at that moment, Makepeace and Bear. Sometimes you had to be patient through pain, or people gave you more pain. Sometimes you had to weather everything and take your bruises. If you were lucky, and if everyone thought you were tamed and trained... there might come a time when you could strike. ~ Frances Hardinge

I want my chirfugging goose back! ~ Frances Hardinge

The small meannesses bred by the law of competition corrode men's character as rust spoils steel. ~ Frances E. Willard

You need bruises to know blessings and I have known both. ~ Frances Shand Kydd

He could gaze upon a particular deep shade of green and pick out every nuance of the color. Zeluppian Fern Green, his mind would inform him. Gray, said his soul. Just a shade of gray with a greenish name. His well-trained tongue could pick out every flavor of a sweetmeat. Honey from bees fed only cowslip nectar, his mind would tell him, with cherries marinated for twenty-one years in peach-and-saffron brandy. Ash, said his soul. Ash and dust. Even ~ Frances Hardinge

Be not afraid! In admitting a creator, refuse not to examine his creation; and take not the assertions of creatures like yourselves, in place of the evidence of your senses and the conviction of your understanding. ~ Frances Wright

In Caverna lies were an art and everybody was an artist, even young children. ~ Frances Hardinge

The mere fact of her sufferings and adventures made her a priceless possession. ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

Yorkshire word and means spoiled and ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

4. If you do not give your chickens enough space, light, air, and walking-around room, they will eat one another. ~ Frances O'Roark Dowell

Americans are worried about pollution - oil trains running through their towns, fracking in their neighborhoods, coal dust in their air. They're worried about what the future will look like for their children if carbon pollution continues unchecked. ~ Frances Beinecke

Marijuana is one of the safest, therapeutically active substances known to man. ~ Frances M. Young