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

Frances Mayes

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Frances Mayes
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: April 4
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Fitzgerald
Georgia
Memory
Forward
Travel
Memories
Dragging
Pushes
Backward
Keeps

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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 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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Italy's siren call lures us more and more.
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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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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Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere I would be different.
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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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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The longer you are in a place, the more you get under its layers.
Frances Mayes
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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.
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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Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world.
Frances Mayes