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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Frances Mayes

Image
Italy's siren call lures us more and more.
Frances Mayes
Image
Venice, the most touristy place in the world, is still just completely magic to me.
Frances Mayes
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world.
Frances Mayes
Image
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
Image
Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.
Frances Mayes
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.
Frances Mayes
Image
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
Image
It's kind of amazing that people will travel because of a book. I admire that.
Frances Mayes
Image
Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere I would be different.
Frances Mayes
Image
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