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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.

Frances Mayes

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Frances Mayes
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: April 4
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Fitzgerald
Georgia
Better
Colored
Look
Painted
Looks
Sage
Must
Houses
Even
Cream
Would
Smart
Beige
Written
Pineapple
House
Pineapples

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It's kind of amazing that people will travel because of a book. I admire that.
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I got the idea that to write books would be the best way to spend a life. I never thought of anything else that seemed like half as much fun, although in my next life I would like to be an architect, too, so I can have an easier time restoring houses.
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Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere I would be different.
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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.
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Whatever a guidebook says, wether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of the place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct.
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There is no technique, there is just the way to do it. Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?
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Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world.
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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.
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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.
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After owning a pool, I think the best way to enjoy the water is to have a friend who has a pool.
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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.
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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.
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I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.
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Italy's siren call lures us more and more.
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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.
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I find that other countries have this or this, but Italy is the only one that has it all for me. The culture, the cuisine, the people, the landscape, the history. Just everything to me comes together there.
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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.
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The Dream Lover-what a bold, insightful, and enticing novel. And how vigorously Elizabeth Berg brings us the iconoclastic life of George Sand. Berg writes with such intimacy and compassion that I think she must have some shared ancestral DNA with Sand. I savored every page.
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As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.
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