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

Frances Mayes

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Frances Mayes
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: April 4
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Fitzgerald
Georgia
Knew
Moving
Culture
Another
Examine
Life
Urge
Urges
Beyond
Move

More quotes by 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.
Frances Mayes
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Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world.
Frances Mayes
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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
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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.
Frances Mayes
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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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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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Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere I would be different.
Frances Mayes
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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?
Frances Mayes
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One of those flash epiphanies of travel, the realization that worlds you'd love vibrantly exist outside your ignorance of them. The vitality of many lives you know nothing about. I could live in this town, so how is it that I've never been here before today?
Frances Mayes
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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.
Frances Mayes
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May summer last a hundred years.
Frances Mayes
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Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.
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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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
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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.
Frances Mayes
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As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.
Frances Mayes
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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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The longer you are in a place, the more you get under its layers.
Frances Mayes
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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.
Frances Mayes
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Italy's siren call lures us more and more.
Frances Mayes