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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

More quotes by Frances Mayes

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The undulent landscape looks serene in every direction. Honey-colored farmhouses, gently placed in hollows, rise like thick loaves of bread set out to cool.
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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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Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere I would be different.
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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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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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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 longer you are in a place, the more you get under its layers.
Frances Mayes
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The words 'forse che si,' 'forse che no', 'perhaps yes,' 'perhaps no,' repeat along all paths.
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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.
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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Italy's siren call lures us more and more.
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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Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world.
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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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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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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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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It's kind of amazing that people will travel because of a book. I admire that.
Frances Mayes
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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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