Under Magnolia Quotes

“Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“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, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“At a few times in my life, I’ve not been aware that I’ve just stepped onto a large X. Change might not be on my mind. Why change? I’ve always admired lives that flourish in place. The taproot reaches all the way to the aquifer, the leaves bud, flourish, fall, and grow again. I like generations following one another in the same house, where lamplight falls through the windows in squares of light on the snow, and somebody’s height chart still marks the kitchen doorway. But there I stand on the X, not knowing it’s time to leap, when, really, I’d only meant to pause.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“Often, seemingly spontaneous acts come from a deep, unacknowledged place, and a sudden decision feels inevitable and right.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“Look if you like but you will have to leap. Yes, I’ve always known that; I just didn’t know that I knew.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“I’m reading more than ever. I’ve started on the left wall of the Carnegie Library and plan to read my way around the room.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“Images are the pegs holding down memory's billowing tent.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“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)”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“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.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“Gertrude Stein said, “As everybody knows, fathers are depressing but our family had one.” Mine had two and both in their mildest forms were depressing”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“Someday we’ll take a train from Moscow to Novosibirsk, reading Chekhov aloud and eating cold potatoes with chugs of vodka. For now, shuttling through Alabama, we discuss what we want on our tombstones. Anne decides on lines from Swinburne’s “The Garden of Proserpine”: From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives forever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“From excerpts I’d read in Philosophy 101 at Randolph-Macon, Marx was dead on, I thought, about the idiocy of rural life. I knew better than to quote Marx. I tuned out everyone on the home front.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“She asked what I had learned in Sunday school and I always said, “Jesus wept.” I didn’t want to go into my feelings about a God who put a father to a test to see if he’d kill his own son like a lamb to roast, and then sent his only child to be nailed onto a cross and fed vinegar”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“What is stranger than memory, that selects a certain day to remain vivid, when thousands of others are totally lost?”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“The dead here seem really dead, and bone lonely, unlike the graves in Italian cemeteries, bedecked with fresh flowers, red votive lights, and photos of the deceased. I always imagine that they must rise at night and visit among themselves, the way they used to in the piazza. I did cry over Absalom, Absalom!”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“The South I knew didn’t transcend. I wanted out of there. No future I imagined took place below the southern fall line. “She took the first thing smoking on the runway out of here,” my family is fond of remembering. But they forget; there was no runway.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“Like Cortona, my best beloved Tuscan hill town, Oxford invites you in, makes you a participant in the repetition and variation of its particular themes. As in Piazza Signorelli, you’re a star in the cast as you step into the daily play. Your breathing slows, your shoulders push back. All the proprioceptors agree: This is how a town should be built. But unlike any Italian town, here the green air under massive trees dislodges my senses: world in a jar. You may stroll in this vast terrarium, or so I felt growing up in a one-mile-square town in south Georgia. One reason I felt immediately at home in Tuscany was that certain strong currents of life reminded me of the South. The warmth of people and their astonishing generosity felt so familiar, and I knew well that identical y’all come hospitality. “It’s unhealthy to eat alone,” our neighbor in Italy told us early on. “We’re cooking every night so come on over.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“Not my father, but someone will be bringing home passels of doves for a luckless woman to pluck and stack in mounds of mauve pink flesh. Those downy feathers rising in the air. Many’s the time I’ve bitten buckshot.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“Under Magnolia is much more than an entrancing memoir: it is a work of art that defies the distinction between prose and poetry or novels and autobiographies. It is also much more than a personal narrative: it is an unflinching meditation on the relation between self and culture, and, more specifically, on the gravitational pull of memory. This is a book to be savored, a feast for both mind and soul.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“In writing a life you search for the white pebbles you didn’t know you dropped to define your way. When they disappear, you instinctively follow the glimmer of swamp fire to the deep woods where time and event collapse, to the original source where love flourishes still.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“But, really, such an uprooting is instinctual. Time to rebel. Internal gears began to grind, propelling you forward—then you invent the reasons. My”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“I never saw the necessity to attend all those classes, so many days a week, or purchase unreadable texts when so much fiction and poetry waited in the bookstore.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“Neither my sisters, who were nowhere near, nor I knew depression; we knew bad mood. We didn’t know drinking as disease, but as character flaw. Weakness. We didn’t know “dysfunctional,” but we lived it. We knew that if you were miserable, you brought it on yourself. She taught us.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“Daddy Jack and Fanny don’t care what I do as long as I stay out of the kitchen. She looms over the stove, madly coating everything she cooks with cayenne pepper and several shakes of Tabasco.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“In my notboredom but lack of available activity, I eavesdrop from their closet, hunching down among the Capezios and crinolines piled on the floor.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“And feigned innocence, the vise that keeps women “girls” well into their sixties.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“Now I find the stack of chapters I called Under Magnolia. Why, after many years, even open these flowered folders? Dare alla luce, the Tuscans say at the birth of a baby, to give to the light.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“The wife Estelle’s stone sinks to the right. The dead here seem really dead, and bone lonely, unlike the graves in Italian cemeteries, bedecked with fresh flowers, red votive lights, and photos of the deceased.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir