Quote

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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Frances Mayes
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: April 4
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Fitzgerald
Georgia
Somewhere
Leave
Says
Whatever
Wether
Sense
Guidebook
Place
Entirely
Matter
Smell
Instinct

More quotes by 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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As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.
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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world.
Frances Mayes
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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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The longer you are in a place, the more you get under its layers.
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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It's kind of amazing that people will travel because of a book. I admire that.
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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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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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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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