Frances Mayes Quotes

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

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

It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Indecision is a virus that can run through an army and destroy its will to win or even to survive.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

What has impressed me the most about the Italians whose tables we've sat at is that they are traditional cooks but also outrageously innovative. These people are wild improvisers.

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

Memory is, of course, a trickster.

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

Never lose your childish enthusiasm and things will come your way.

Italy's siren call lures us more and more.

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

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

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

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

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.

May summer last a hundred years.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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