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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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Frances Mayes
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: April 4
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Fitzgerald
Georgia
Lived
Pool
Eyebrow
Walking
Italian
Gene
Small
Lifts
Georgia
Family
Length
Eyebrows
Understand
Town
Neck
Living
Towns
Lift
Way
Recognize
Genes
South
Necks

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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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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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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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Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world.
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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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After owning a pool, I think the best way to enjoy the water is to have a friend who has a pool.
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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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Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere I would be different.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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The longer you are in a place, the more you get under its layers.
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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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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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The words 'forse che si,' 'forse che no', 'perhaps yes,' 'perhaps no,' repeat along all paths.
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It's kind of amazing that people will travel because of a book. I admire that.
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Venice, the most touristy place in the world, is still just completely magic to me.
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May summer last a hundred years.
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