Frances Mayes
Frances Mayes
Frances Mayes is an American university professor, poet, memoirist, essayist, and novelist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth4 April 1940
CountryUnited States of America
risk cracks world
The world cracks open for those willing to take a risk.
smart house looks
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.
blue promise apricots
Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.
country differences looks
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.
notebook color sky
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?
fate expression blood
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.
way enthusiasm your-children
Never lose your childish enthusiasm and things will come your way.
summer fog years
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.
sirens lure
Italy's siren call lures us more and more.
memories favorite-words two
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.
summer years may
May summer last a hundred years.
running army winning
Indecision is a virus that can run through an army and destroy its will to win or even to survive.
dream writing thinking
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.
discovery fields language
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.