112 Quotes by Frances Mayes

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

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.

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?

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

We are walking on the foundations of literature, up the steep, stony path in the fiery heat.

The Italians have their priorities right: They’re driven, they do their work, but they really enjoy the day-to-day and they don’t put off the enjoyment of the everyday for some future goal.

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.

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

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.