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Italy's siren call lures us more and more.

Frances Mayes

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Frances Mayes
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: April 4
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Fitzgerald
Georgia
Siren
Sirens
Lure
Italy
Call
Lures

More quotes by 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.
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The longer you are in a place, the more you get under its layers.
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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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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 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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It's kind of amazing that people will travel because of a book. I admire that.
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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 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.
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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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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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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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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Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere I would be different.
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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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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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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May summer last a hundred years.
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 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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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