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43332d4
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Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.
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Frances Mayes |
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9f7222e
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Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.
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Frances Mayes |
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f0ed528
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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.
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identity
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Frances Mayes |
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cec8e65
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There is no technique, there is just the way to do it. Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?
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Frances Mayes |
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534e640
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I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.
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Frances Mayes |
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9ff9010
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A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.
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Frances Mayes |
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9336a2f
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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.
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Frances Mayes |
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1cf3b52
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The world cracks open for those willing to take a risk.
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Frances Mayes |
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d95ef3e
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Do you know the most surprising thing about divorce? It doesn't actually kill you. Like a bullet to the heart or a head-on car wreck. It should. When someone you've promised to cherish till death do you part says "I never loved you," it should kill you instantly. You shouldn't have to wake up day after day after that, trying to understand how in the world you didn't know. The light just never went on, you know. I must have known, of course,..
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Frances Mayes |
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b126a15
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Like fanning through a deck of cards, my mind flashes on the thousand chances, trivial to profound, that converged to re-create this place. Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different. Where did the expression "a place in the sun" first come from? My rational thought process cling always to the idea of free will, random event; my blood, however, streams easily along a current of fate. "
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Frances Mayes |
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17ba7de
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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. The breeze lifting a blue curtain in a doorway billows just the same whether you are lucky enough to observe it or not. Travel gives such jolts. I could live in this town, so how is it that I've never been here before today?
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Frances Mayes |
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b7d842f
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As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.
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Frances Mayes |
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5f49e25
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All afternoon in the deck chair, I try to describe to my notebook the colors of the water and sky. How to translate sunlight into words?
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Frances Mayes |
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1e2aad0
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Everything I pick up seems to lure me away. Everything I do in my daily life begins to feel like striking wet matches. The need to travel is a mysterious force. A desire to 'go' runs through me equally with an intense desire to 'stay' at home. An equal and opposite thermodynamic principle. When I travel, I think of home and what it means. At home I'm dreaming of catching trains at night in the gray light of Old Europe, or pushing open shutt..
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Frances Mayes |
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5cec1e3
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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.
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Frances Mayes |
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08e8069
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Travel releases spontaneity. You become a godlike creature full or choice, free to visit the stately pleasure domes, make love in the morning, sketch a bell tower, read a history of Byzantium, stare for one hour at the face of Leonardo da Vinci's 'Madonna dei fusi.' You open, as in childhood, and--for a time--receive this world. There's visceral aspect, too--the huntress who is free. Free to go, free to return home bringing memories to lay ..
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Frances Mayes |
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ed02ae4
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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.
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Frances Mayes |
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d81bab1
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My idea of heaven still is to drive the gravel farm roads of Umbria and Tuscany, very pleasantly lost.
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Frances Mayes |
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3e31c9b
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Whatever a guidebook says, wether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of the place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct.
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Frances Mayes |
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079274d
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We were given one country and we've set up in another.
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Frances Mayes |
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ddc45f0
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At Bramasole, the first secret spot that draws me outside is a stump and board bench on a high terrace overlooking the lake and valley. Before I sit down, I must bang the board against a tree to knock off all the ants. Then I'm happy. With a stunted oak tree for shelter and a never-ending view, I am hidden. No one knows where I am. The nine-year-old's thrill of the hideout under the hydrangea comes back: My mother is calling me and I am not..
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sense-of-place
italy
home
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Frances Mayes |
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b7f0922
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There are reasons we congregate in these hot spots- to worship beauty and to feel its effects light up the electrolytes in the bloodstream.
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nature
inspiration
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Frances Mayes |
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c349bcc
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When you travel you become invisible if you want. I do want. I like to be the observer. What makes these people who they are Could I feel at home here No one expects you to have the stack of papers back by Tuesday or to check messages or to fertilize the geraniums or to sit full of dread in the waiting room at the protologist's office. When travelling you have the delectable possibility of not understanding a word of what is said to you. La..
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Frances Mayes |
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14f9868
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Italy's siren call lures us more and more.
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Frances Mayes |
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a8d7427
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The queen bee's life is totally overrated. All she does is lay eggs, lay eggs. She takes one nuptial flight. That one stuns her with enough fertile power to be trapped in the hive forever. The workers--the sexually undeveloped females--have the best life. They have fields of flowers to roll in. Imagine turning over and over inside a rose.
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Frances Mayes |
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ca299f6
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Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.
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frances-mayes
forgiveness-quotes
childhood-trauma
southern
southerners
memoir
father
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Frances Mayes |
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f440d8a
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Although he's slight, he has that wiry strength that seems to come more from will than muscle.
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Frances Mayes |
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cdea560
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Growing up in Fitzgerald, I lived in an intense microcosm, where your neighbor knows what you're going to do even before you do, where you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking. What is said, what is left to the imagination, what is denied, withheld, exaggerated-all these secretive, inverted things informed my childhood. Writing the stories that I found in the box, I remembe..
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frances-mayes
georgia
south
southerners
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Frances Mayes |
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c1d274b
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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.
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Frances Mayes |
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951a8ca
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At a few times in my life, I've not been aware that I've just stepped onto a large X. Change might not be on my mind. Why change? I've always admired lives that flourish in place. The taproot reaches all the way to the aquifer, the leaves bud, flourish, fall, and grow again. I like generations following one another in the same house, where lamplight falls through the windows in squares of light on the snow, and somebody's height chart still..
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Frances Mayes |
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6eccb0b
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There is so much jasmine and nightshade in the garden that we all wake with lyrical headaches.
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Frances Mayes |
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4134dd5
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If I lived here,...I have a feeling this place would take me.
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Frances Mayes |
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9a580fb
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Behind sunglasses we linger over espresso, talking about pizza as an art form, the geekiness of people's travel clothes...
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Frances Mayes |
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5c2caa6
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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?
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Frances Mayes |
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6aa36e6
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What a strange mind, to cover the real thing with an imitation of something real.
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Frances Mayes |
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9ddac84
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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.
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Frances Mayes |
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1a791a9
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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...
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Frances Mayes |
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668312e
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We pass the apartment we rented five years ago, when I swore off Florence. In summer, wads of tourists clog the city as if it's a Renaissance theme park. Everyone seems to be eating. That year, a garbage strike persisted for over a week and I began to have thoughts of plague when I passed heaps of rot spilling out of bins. I was amazed that long July when waiters and shopkeepers remained as nice as they did, given what they had to put up wi..
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Frances Mayes |
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6d17a9a
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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.
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writing
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Frances Mayes |
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4313d4c
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Martin Buber said, 'All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.
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Frances Mayes |
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44ad9c5
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A lifelong insomniac, I sleep like one newly dead every night and dream deeply harmonious dreams of swimming along with the current in a clear green river, playing and at home in the water. On the first night, I dreamed that the real name of the house was not Bramasole but Cento Angeli, One Hundred Angels, and that I would discover them one by one. Is it bad luck to change the name of a house, as it is to rename a boat? As a trepid foreigne..
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Frances Mayes |
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3406592
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The words 'forse che si,' 'forse che no', 'perhaps yes,' 'perhaps no,' repeat along all paths.
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Frances Mayes |
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45aa5dc
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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."
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travel
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Frances Mayes |
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f42e4b0
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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?
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Frances Mayes |