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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
Backward
Keeps
Memory
Forward
Travel
Memories
Dragging
Pushes

More quotes by 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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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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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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Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere I would be different.
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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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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Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.
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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The words 'forse che si,' 'forse che no', 'perhaps yes,' 'perhaps no,' repeat along all paths.
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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It's kind of amazing that people will travel because of a book. I admire that.
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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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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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.
Frances Mayes
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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.
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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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 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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The longer you are in a place, the more you get under its layers.
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