Frances Mayes Quotes

“Where you are is who you are. The inside 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.”

“Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.”

“My idea of heaven still is to drive the gravel farm roads of Umbria and Tuscany, very pleasantly lost.”

“Whatever a guidebook says, whether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of the place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct.”

“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.”

“There is no technique, there is just the way to do it. Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?”

“Although divorce was harder than a death, still I felt oddly returned to myself after many years in a close family.”

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

“Splendid to arrive alone in a foreign country and feel the assault of difference. Here they were all along, busy with living; they don’t talk or look like me. The rhythm of their day if entirely different; I am thoroughly foreign.”

“We were given one country and we’ve set ourselves up in another.”

“What if you did not feel uncertainty, the white writing says. Are you exempt from doubt? Why not rename it excitement?”

“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.”

“Memory is, of course, a trickster.”

“‘Send me out into another life lord because this one is growing faint I do not think it goes all the way.’”

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

“May summer last a hundred years.”

“Restoration. I like the word. The house, the land, perhaps ourselves. But restored to what? Our lives are full. It’s our zeal for all this work that amazes me.”

“A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.”

“I recognize the desire to surprise your own life. ‘You must change your life,’ as the poet Rilke said.”

“I simply fell in love - like you fall in love with a person - and schemed to find a way to stay there. It wasn’t easy.”