Quotes from Frances Mayes

Memory is capricious. I can look back and see decadence, old bigots, the constant racial slurs, the bores, the wild cards, the bighearted, the family album of alcoholics, the saints, the old aunt propped in a chair saying only da-da, the slow-motion suicides, but at four, six, ten, they loomed, powerful, not as types but as themselves. Among them, logic takes wing. (pg. 31)

Images are the pegs holding down memory's billowing tent.

the houses that are important to us are the ones that allow us to dream in peace.

POMMAROLA Tomato Sauce ½ cup extra-virgin olive oil 1 small onion, minced 1 28-ounce can of whole tomatoes, or 6–8 firm fresh tomatoes, peeled ½ cup basil leaves, chopped Salt and pepper Heat oil and add onion. After 5 minutes over medium heat, add tomatoes and break them up with a spoon. Add basil and salt and pepper to taste. Cook for 10 minutes on high heat, uncovered, to reduce it. Makes 3 cups.

The bricked-up fourteenth-century "doors of the dead" are still visible. These ghosts of doors beside the main entrance were designed, some say, to take out the plague victims—bad luck for them to exit by the main entrance. I notice in the regular doors, people often leave their keys in the lock.

You have to churn somewhat when the roof covering your head is at stake, since to sell is to walk away from a cluster of memories and to buy is to choose where the future will take place.

Elena Ferrante

Now I find the stack of chapters I called Under Magnolia. Why, after many years, even open these flowered folders? Dare alla luce, the Tuscans say at the birth of a baby, to give to the light.

Though much had been changed, I felt the spirit of the book was intact, and even enhanced by her vision.

Gertrude Stein said, "As everybody knows, fathers are depressing but our family had one." Mine had two and both in their mildest forms were depressing

Egy kínai költÅ' sok száz évvel ezelÅ'tt azt mondta, hogy ha valamit leírunk, újra át is éljük.

It's daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible. Is this one of the mysteries of travel? One returns to preverbal pointing, smiling, shaping the air with gestures.

Used to have a pet turtle named George.

Had his own way of praying, he had said; that old excuse. As if we were meant to be solitary. As if the church were not about holding the community together, as this sinful one needed.

And feigned innocence, the vise that keeps women "girls" well into their sixties.

Simply put, ferragosto, August 15, marks the ascension of the corporeal body and soul of the Virgin Mary into heaven. Why August 15? Perhaps it was too hot to remain on earth another day.

And, I think, for those of us who came of age with the women's movement, there's always the fear that it's not real, you're not really allowed to determine your own life. It may be pulled back at any moment.

Falling in love with a book brings the same catapulting madness and zest that falling in love with a person brings.

Neither my sisters, who were nowhere near, nor I knew depression; we knew bad mood. We didn't know drinking as disease, but as character flaw. Weakness. We didn't know "dysfunctional," but we lived it. We knew that if you were miserable, you brought it on yourself. She taught us.

One pleasure of being old, I realize, is that you're free. Beyond caring what the neighbors might think.

Under Magnolia is much more than an entrancing memoir: it is a work of art that defies the distinction between prose and poetry or novels and autobiographies. It is also much more than a personal narrative: it is an unflinching meditation on the relation between self and culture, and, more specifically, on the gravitational pull of memory. This is a book to be savored, a feast for both mind and soul.

Sicily: A Short History from the Ancient Greeks to Cosa Nostra by John Julius Norwich

Much about home is imagining home

The wife Estelle's stone sinks to the right. The dead here seem really dead, and bone lonely, unlike the graves in Italian cemeteries, bedecked with fresh flowers, red votive lights, and photos of the deceased.