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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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Frances Mayes
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: April 4
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Fitzgerald
Georgia
People
Countries
History
Culture
Comes
Together
Find
Cuisine
Everything
Italy
Country
Landscape

More quotes by 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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Italy's siren call lures us more and more.
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.
Frances Mayes
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Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere I would be different.
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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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
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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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May summer last a hundred years.
Frances Mayes
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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.
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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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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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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Venice, the most touristy place in the world, is still just completely magic to me.
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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The words 'forse che si,' 'forse che no', 'perhaps yes,' 'perhaps no,' repeat along all paths.
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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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.
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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I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.
Frances Mayes
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Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.
Frances Mayes