Quotes from Frances Mayes

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.

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.

I think I went to Italy initially for the art, architecture, food and history, but I stayed there because of the people in Cortona.

Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

What has impressed me the most about the Italians whose tables we've sat at is that they are traditional cooks but also outrageously innovative. These people are wild improvisers.

They all agree, Italy is not what it used to be. What is? All my adult life I've heard how Silicon Valley used to be all orchards, how Atlanta used to be genteel, how publishing used to be run by gentlemen, how houses used to cost what a car costs now. All true, but what can you do but live now?

Although he's slight, he has that wiry strength that seems to come more from will than muscle.

What a strange mind, to cover the real thing with an imitation of something real.

There is so much jasmine and nightshade in the garden that we all wake with lyrical headaches.

Behind sunglasses we linger over espresso, talking about pizza as an art form, the geekiness of people's travel clothes...

Always, I liked the infinitive 'to go.' Let's go, let's go. let's really go. 'Andare' was the first verb I learned to conjugate in Italian. 'Andiamo,' let's go, teh sound comes out at a gallop.

If I lived here,...I have a feeling this place would take me.

Martin Buber said, 'All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.

He said he couldn't understand a world 'shameless and cruel enough to divide its people by color when color is in fact the sign of God's artistic genius.

But the essence of a place, the part of it that picks you up and puts you down somewhere else, cannot be given to the reader through factual description. And maybe not at all. You have to find your own secret images. The slow fall of a coin into the gorge with the sun catching the copper only for a moment, and the fall into nothing says more about a sense of place than three pages of restaurant and hotel descriptions...

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.

Stone houses, terrace walls, city walls, streets. Plant any rose and you hit four or five big ones. All the Etruscan sarcophagi with likenesses of the dead carved on top in realistic, living poses must have come out of the most natural transference into death they could imagine. After lifetimes of dealing with stone, why not, in death, turn into it?

Finally I caught on that what you buy today is ready—picked or dug this morning at its peak. This also explained another puzzle; I never understood why Italian refrigerators are so minute until I realized that they don't store food the way we do. The Sub-Zero giant I have at home begins to seem almost institutional compared to the toy fridge I now have here.

You never know, of course, when you write a book what its fate will be. Sink out of sight, soar to the sun–who knows. I love this quote from Frances Mayes. It pretty much sums up the Great Unknown of book writing.

We are walking on the foundations of literature, up the steep, stony path in the fiery heat.

The words 'forse che si,' 'forse che no', 'perhaps yes,' 'perhaps no,' repeat along all paths.

And my mother, whose radius of travel was short, tied the letters with ribbon and kept them in her desk, When you get the chance, she said to me, go.

As Chevalley says,] 'Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect...