{"author":"Frances Mayes","author_id":"Frances+Mayes","total_quotes":21,"quotes":[{"text":"At Bramasole, the first secret spot that draws me outside is a stump and board bench on a high terrace overlooking the lake and valley. Before I sit down, I must bang the board against a tree to knock off all the ants. Then I'm happy. With a stunted oak tree for shelter and a never-ending view, I am hidden. No one knows where I am. The nine-year-old's thrill of the hideout under the hydrangea comes back: My mother is calling me and I am not answering.","author":"Frances Mayes","tags":["garden","home","italy","sense-of-place"],"id":3001,"author_id":"Frances+Mayes"},{"text":"A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice. ","author":"Frances Mayes","tags":["writing"],"id":4561,"author_id":"Frances+Mayes"},{"text":"Had his own way of praying, he had said; that old excuse. As if we were meant to be solitary. As if the church were not about holding the community together, as this sinful one needed.","author":"Frances Mayes","tags":["community"],"id":33271,"author_id":"Frances+Mayes"},{"text":"First memory: a man at the back door is saying, I have real bad news, sweat is dripping off his face, Garbert's been shot, noise from my mother, I run to her room behind her, I'm jumping on the canopied bed while she cries, she's pulling out drawers looking for a handkerchief, Now, he's all right, the man say, they think, patting her shoulder, I'm jumping higher, I'm not allowed, they think he saved old man Mayes, the bed slats dislodge and the mattress collapses. My mother lunges for me.Many traveled to Reidsville for the event, but my family did not witness Willis Barnes's electrocution, From kindergarten through high school, Donette, the murderer's daughter, was in my class. We played together at recess. Sometimes she'd spit on me.","author":"Frances Mayes","tags":["childhood-memories","childhood-trauma","father","frances-mayes","memoir","mother","shooting","southern","southerners"],"id":72416,"author_id":"Frances+Mayes"},{"text":"Images are the pegs holding down memory's billowing tent.","author":"Frances Mayes","tags":["frances-mayes","memory"],"id":74884,"author_id":"Frances+Mayes"},{"text":"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.","author":"Frances Mayes","tags":["travel","travel-writing"],"id":103458,"author_id":"Frances+Mayes"},{"text":"You never know, of course, when you write a book what its fate will be. Sink out of sight, soar to the sun–who knows. I love this quote from Frances Mayes. It pretty much sums up the Great Unknown of book writing.","author":"Frances Mayes","tags":["books","writing"],"id":104193,"author_id":"Frances+Mayes"},{"text":"There are reasons we congregate in these hot spots- to worship beauty and to feel its effects light up the electrolytes in the bloodstream.","author":"Frances Mayes","tags":["beauty-in-nature","inspiration","nature"],"id":140483,"author_id":"Frances+Mayes"},{"text":"Memory is capricious. I can look back and see decadence, old bigots, the constant racial slurs, the bores, the wild cards, the bighearted, the family album of alcoholics, the saints, the old aunt propped in a chair saying only 'da-da,' the slow-motion suicides, but at four, six, ten, they loomed, powerful, not as types but as themselves. Among them, logic takes wing.' (pg. 31).","author":"Frances Mayes","tags":["family","memory"],"id":143735,"author_id":"Frances+Mayes"},{"text":"And my mother, whose radius of travel was short, tied the letters with ribbon and kept them in her desk, When you get the chance, she said to me, 'go.","author":"Frances Mayes","tags":["missed-opportunities","travel"],"id":149761,"author_id":"Frances+Mayes"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":21,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}