Quote

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

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
Like
Fields
Poetry
Pleasure
Happiness
Pleasures
Natural
Guide
Language
Guides
Born
Field
Would
Discovery

More quotes by 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
Venice, the most touristy place in the world, is still just completely magic to me.
Frances Mayes
Image
Italy's siren call lures us more and more.
Frances Mayes
Image
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
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
Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.
Frances Mayes
Image
Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere I would be different.
Frances Mayes
Image
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
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
Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world.
Frances Mayes
Image
After owning a pool, I think the best way to enjoy the water is to have a friend who has a pool.
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
The words 'forse che si,' 'forse che no', 'perhaps yes,' 'perhaps no,' repeat along all paths.
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
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
Image
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
Image
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
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
As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.
Frances Mayes
Image
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?
Frances Mayes