Quote

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

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Frances Mayes
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: April 4
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Fitzgerald
Georgia
Feel
Difference
Splendid
Feels
Differences
Assault
Different
Alone
Arrive
Like
Talk
Entirely
Living
Rhythm
Look
Foreign
Looks
Busy
Country
Along

More quotes by Frances Mayes

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Venice, the most touristy place in the world, is still just completely magic to me.
Frances Mayes
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Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.
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Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere I would be different.
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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.
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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.
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The words 'forse che si,' 'forse che no', 'perhaps yes,' 'perhaps no,' repeat along all paths.
Frances Mayes
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
Frances Mayes
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May summer last a hundred years.
Frances Mayes
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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.
Frances Mayes
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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.
Frances Mayes
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Italy's siren call lures us more and more.
Frances Mayes
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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.
Frances Mayes
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The longer you are in a place, the more you get under its layers.
Frances Mayes
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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.
Frances Mayes
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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.
Frances Mayes
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It's kind of amazing that people will travel because of a book. I admire that.
Frances Mayes
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As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.
Frances Mayes