Quotes from Frances Mayes

A green light is a green light, avanti, avanti," the mayor explained. "A red light—just a suggestion." And yellow? he was asked. "Yellow is for gaiety.

And how orderly the kitchen is." "My secret weapon: clean up as you go.

Southerners have a gene, as yet undetected in the DNA spirals, that causes them to believe that place is fate. 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.

Not my father, but someone will be bringing home passels of doves for a luckless woman to pluck and stack in mounds of mauve pink flesh. Those downy feathers rising in the air. Many's the time I've bitten buckshot.

we respond immediately to language that seems to be experience, rather than language that seems to describe experience from a distance

The South I knew didn't transcend. I wanted out of there. No future I imagined took place below the southern fall line. "She took the first thing smoking on the runway out of here," my family is fond of remembering. But they forget; there was no runway.

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. I always imagine that they must rise at night and visit among themselves, the way they used to in the piazza. I did cry over Absalom, Absalom!

The air is full of sounds; the sky of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered with hints…So wrote Emerson and he is right. The world

Kiedy zapyta?am mojego przyjaciela jakie miejsce do zamieszkania uwa?a za najlepsze, odpowiedzia?: Nigdzie, ko?o gdzieb?dzia.

If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell (Virgil, Aeneid).

She asked what I had learned in Sunday school and I always said, "Jesus wept." I didn't want to go into my feelings about a God who put a father to a test to see if he'd kill his own son like a lamb to roast, and then sent his only child to be nailed onto a cross and fed vinegar

The whole of everything is never told. (Henry James.)

What is stranger than memory, that selects a certain day to remain vivid, when thousands of others are totally lost?

Travel is a journey into one's own ignorance.

batch of obsidian-like fudge, Ashley disdained the kitchen.

Going to Europe as a budding cook opened my eyes to food in a different way. When I got to Italy, the first thing I did was put my little basil plants in the ground and watch them turn into big, healthy bushes.

I was born and grew up in Fitzgerald, way down in south Georgia. It was a mill town and my family ran the cotton mill. My grandfather was mayor many times and my family felt deeply rooted to that spot.

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.

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.

It's kind of amazing that people will travel because of a book. I admire that.

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.

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.

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

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.