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. I could live in this town, so how is it that I've never been here before today?

Frances Mayes

Categorized in : Giving Blue Ignorance

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

Frances Mayes

offers chance thousand

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

Frances Mayes

arbitrary different would-be

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

cooks technique way

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

language responsibility travel

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

Frances Mayes

chinese poet alive

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

Frances Mayes

urges culture moving

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

language fields discovery

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

spots forever memories

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

Frances Mayes

obstacles childhood order

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

landscape honey looks

If you've got a plot the size of a car or a tiny yard in Italy, you're going to be growing tomatoes and basil and celery and carrots, and everybody is still connected to the land.

Frances Mayes

yards car land

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

Frances Mayes

venice magic world

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 shutters to see Florence awaken. The balance just slightly tips in the direction of the airport.

Frances Mayes

dream home running

I loved every place I lived and traveled. London, Paris, Rome, Venice. I fell hard for Central America and Mexico. In each country, I had fantasies that I could live there.

Frances Mayes

rome paris country

the house protects the dreamer; the houses that are important to us are the ones that allow us to dream in peace. Guests we've had stop in for a night or two all come down the first morning, ready to tell their dreams.

Frances Mayes

dream morning night

When I was twelve, I started reading Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee, and - do we dare breathe the name - William Faulkner.

Frances Mayes

twelve reading names

The words 'forse che si,' 'forse che no', 'perhaps yes,' 'perhaps no,' repeat along all paths.

Frances Mayes

repeats path

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

smell instinct matter

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

Frances Mayes

army winning running

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

writing fun book