Growing up in Fitzgerald, I lived in an intense microcosm, where your neighbor knows what you're going to do even before you do, where you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking. What is said, what is left to the imagination, what is denied, withheld, exaggerated-all these secretive, inverted things informed my childhood. Writing the stories that I found in the box, I remember being particularly fascinated by secrets kept in order to protect someone from who you are. That protection, sharpest knife in the drawer, I absorbed as naturally as a southern accent. At that time, I was curious to hold up to the light glimpses of the family that I had so efficiently fled. We were remote-back behind nowhere-when I was growing up, but even so, enormous social change was about to crumble foundations. Who were we, way far South? "We're south of everywhere, " my mother used to lament. . Frances Mayes
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More Quotes By Frances Mayes
  1. 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.
  2. A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.
  3. 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.
  4. Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.
  5. There are reasons we congregate in these hot spots- to worship beauty and to feel its effects light up the electrolytes in the bloodstream.
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