112 Quotes by Frances Mayes

Although he’s slight, he has that wiry strength that seems to come more from will than muscle.

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...

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

Oh, come on, he was twenty-six. And he had poetry on his lips.

He’s already tan, and leaning on the rail in his yellow linen shirt, with the pure glory of Venice racing behind him, I think he looks like someone I’d like to run off with, if I already hadn’t.

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?

Vicki shines with intelligence as brightly as with beauty, a clear open face, black eyes, and a smile that makes you see what she looked like as a nine-year-old.

When books go out into the world, they take on a life. Sometimes that life is a quiet and dusty one, waiting on the nether regions of library stacks. I have books of poetry like that. With others, the book’s life is one of surprise because the book keeps on making its way, on it’s own, into intriguing and larger spaces.

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.