Frances Mayes quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Frances Mayes

Frances Mayes Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Frances Mayes on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Anytime the perfume of orange and lemon groves wafts in the window; the human body has to feel suffused with a languorous well-being.

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Italy's siren call lures us more and more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memory is, of course, a trickster.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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