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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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Frances Mayes
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: April 4
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Fitzgerald
Georgia
Completely
Magic
Place
Stills
Still
World
Venice

More quotes by Frances Mayes

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Italy's siren call lures us more and more.
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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.
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I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.
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As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere I would be different.
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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.
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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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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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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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'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.
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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