Top 80 Frances Mayes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Frances Mayes

2. “The world cracks open for those willing to take a risk.”

— Frances Mayes

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

— Frances Mayes

4. “Never lose your childish enthusiasm and things will come your way.”

— Frances Mayes

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

— Frances Mayes

6. “Indecision is a virus that can run through an army and destroy its will to win or even to survive.”

— Frances Mayes

7. “Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.”

— Frances Mayes

8. “I got the idea that to write books would be the best way to spend a life. I never thought of anything else that seemed like half as much fun, although in my next life I would like to be an architect, too, so I can have an easier time restoring houses.”

— Frances Mayes

9. “Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world.”

— Frances Mayes

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

— Frances Mayes

11. “Often, seemingly spontaneous acts come from a deep, unacknowledged place, and a sudden decision feels inevitable and right.”

— Frances Mayes

12. “Travel is a privilege because it gives you the world you were not given. It allows you to be extant in other versions.”

— Frances Mayes

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

— Frances Mayes

14. “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.”

— Frances Mayes

15. “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.”

— Frances Mayes

16. “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?”

— Frances Mayes

17. “The longer you are in a place, the more you get under its layers.”

— Frances Mayes

18. “I find that other countries have this or this, but Italy is the only one that has it all for me. The culture, the cuisine, the people, the landscape, the history. Just everything to me comes together there.”

— Frances Mayes

19. “Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.”

— Frances Mayes

20. “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.”

— Frances Mayes

21. “May summer last a hundred years.”

— Frances Mayes

22. “Anytime the perfume of orange and lemon groves wafts in the window; the human body has to feel suffused with a languorous well-being.”

— Frances Mayes

23. “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.”

— Frances Mayes

24. “Where is it written that houses must be beige? Any dun colored house would look better if painted pineapple, cream, ochre, or even a smart sage.”

— Frances Mayes

25. “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.”

— Frances Mayes

26. “Venice, the most touristy place in the world, is still just completely magic to me.”

— Frances Mayes

27. “The Dream Lover-what a bold, insightful, and enticing novel. And how vigorously Elizabeth Berg brings us the iconoclastic life of George Sand. Berg writes with such intimacy and compassion that I think she must have some shared ancestral DNA with Sand. I savored every page.”

— Frances Mayes

28. “Instead of winding and skirting, Roman roads tend to go straight to the top. The chariots were light and the shortest distance between two points seemed to have governed their surveyors. I’ve read that some of their roadbeds go down twelve feet.”

— Frances Mayes

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

— Frances Mayes

30. “I’m mixed on figs. The fleshy quality feels spooky. In Italian, il fico, fig, has a slangy turn into la fica, meaning vulva. Possibly because of the famous fig leaf exodus from Eden, it seems like the most ancient of fruits. Oddest, too – the fig flower is inside the fruit. To pull one open is to look into a complex, primitive, infinitely sophisticated life cycle tableau.”

— Frances Mayes

31. “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.”

— Frances Mayes

32. “I’ll always marvel at the liveliness of southern speech-so full of metaphor and hyperbole, quirks and vividness.”

— Frances Mayes

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

— Frances Mayes

34. “As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.”

— Frances Mayes

35. “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.”

— Frances Mayes

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

— Frances Mayes

37. “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.”

— Frances Mayes

38. “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.”

— Frances Mayes

39. “Images are the pegs holding down memory’s billowing tent.”

— Frances Mayes

40. “I’m just fascinated by houses. In another life, I’d have probably trained as an architect. If I had enough money, I’d collect them like other people collect teapots. I don’t know why I love them so much. I’m just very interested in the idea of a house as a metaphor for the way one lives.”

— Frances Mayes

41. “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, but I was too scared to see the truth. Then fear just makes you so stupid.”

— Frances Mayes

42. “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.”

— Frances Mayes

43. “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 on the hearth.”

— Frances Mayes

44. “Look if you like but you will have to leap. Yes, I’ve always known that; I just didn’t know that I knew.”

— Frances Mayes

45. “He’s delighted to read what the mayor of Naples says about driving there. Naples is the most chaotic city for drivers on earth. Ed loved it – he got to drive on the sidewalk while the pedestrians filled the street. “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.”

— Frances Mayes

46. “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.”

— Frances Mayes

47. “Memory is, of course, a trickster.”

— Frances Mayes

48. “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.”

— Frances Mayes

49. “What is life but this? Choices made early in a relationship determine the course.”

— Frances Mayes

50. “The undulent landscape looks serene in every direction. Honey-colored farmhouses, gently placed in hollows, rise like thick loaves of bread set out to cool.”

— Frances Mayes