Under the Tuscan Sun Quotes

“Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy

“Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy

“Where you are is who you are. The further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it. Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy

“There is no technique, there is just the way to do it.
Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy

“I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy

“A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy

“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. ”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy

“Do you know the most surprising thing about divorce? It doesn't actually kill you. Like a bullet to the heart or a head-on car wreck. It should. When someone you've promised to cherish till death do you part says "I never loved you," it should kill you instantly. You shouldn't have to wake up day after day after that, trying to understand how in the world you didn't know. The light just never went on, you know. I must have known, of course, but I was too scared to see the truth. Then fear just makes you so stupid.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy

“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. ”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy

“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.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy

“My idea of heaven still is to drive the gravel farm roads of Umbria and Tuscany, very pleasantly lost.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

“Whatever a guidebook says, wether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of the place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy

“We were given one country and we've set up in another.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy

“The queen bee's life is totally overrated. All she does is lay eggs, lay eggs. She takes one nuptial flight. That one stuns her with enough fertile power to be trapped in the hive forever. The workers—the sexually undeveloped females—have the best life. They have fields of flowers to roll in. Imagine turning over and over inside a rose.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

“They all agree, Italy is not what it used to be. What is? All my adult life I've heard how Silicon Valley used to be all orchards, how Atlanta used to be genteel, how publishing used to be run by gentlemen, how houses used to cost what a car costs now. All true, but what can you do but live now?”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

“Although he's slight, he has that wiry strength that seems to come more from will than muscle.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy

“What a strange mind, to cover the real thing with an imitation of something real.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

“We pass the apartment we rented five years ago, when I swore off Florence. In summer, wads of tourists clog the city as if it's a Renaissance theme park. Everyone seems to be eating. That year, a garbage strike persisted for over a week and I began to have thoughts of plague when I passed heaps of rot spilling out of bins. I was amazed that long July when waiters and shopkeepers remained as nice as they did, given what they had to put up with. Everywhere I stepped I was in the way. Humanity seemed ugly—the international young in torn T-shirts and backpacks lounging on steps, bewildered bus tourists dropping ice cream napkins in the street and asking, “How much is that in dollars?” Germans in too-short shorts letting their children terrorize restaurants. The English mother and daughter ordering lasagne verdi and Coke, then complaining because the spinach pasta was green. My own reflection in the window, carrying home all my shoe purchases, the sundress not so flattering. Bad wonderland. Henry James in Florence referred to “one's detested fellow-pilgrim.” Yes, indeed, and it's definitely time to leave when one's own reflection is included. Sad that our century has added no glory to Florence—only mobs and lead hanging in the air.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

“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?”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

“A lifelong insomniac, I sleep like one newly dead every night and dream deeply harmonious dreams of swimming along with the current in a clear green river, playing and at home in the water. On the first night, I dreamed that the real name of the house was not Bramasole but Cento Angeli, One Hundred Angels, and that I would discover them one by one. Is it bad luck to change the name of a house, as it is to rename a boat? As a trepid foreigner, I wouldn't. But for me, the house now has a secret name as well as its own name.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

“Send me out into another life lord because this one is growing faint I do not think it goes all the way.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

“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.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy

“He's delighted to read what the mayor of Naples says about driving there. Naples is the most chaotic city for drivers on earth. Ed loved it—he got to drive on the sidewalk while the pedestrians filled the street. “A green light is a green light, avanti, avanti,” the mayor explained. “A red light—just a suggestion.” And yellow? he was asked. “Yellow is for gaiety.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

“Finally I caught on that what you buy today is ready—picked or dug this morning at its peak. This also explained another puzzle; I never understood why Italian refrigerators are so minute until I realized that they don't store food the way we do. The Sub-Zero giant I have at home begins to seem almost institutional compared to the toy fridge I now have here.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

“Siesta becomes a ritual. We pull in the shutters, leaving the windows open. All over the house, ladders of light fall across the floor. If I am mad enough to take a walk after one-thirty, no one is out, not even a dog. The word torpor comes to mind. All shops close during the sacred three hours. If you need something for bee sting or allergy, too bad. Siesta is prime time for sex, too. Maybe this accounts for the Mediterranean temperament versus the northern; children conceived in the light and children conceived in the dark.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy

“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.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy

“Don't plant any Peace roses,” a friend and connoisseur of roses advised. “They're such a cliché.” But not only are they dazzling, the vanilla cream, peach, and rosy blush colors repeat the colors of the house.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

“Instead of winding and skirting, Roman roads tend to go straight to the top. The chariots were light and the shortest distance between two points seemed to have governed their surveyors. I've read that some of their roadbeds go down twelve feet.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

“We feel prepared to face the reality of restoration. We walk into town for coffee and telephone Piero Rizzatti, the geometra. The translations “draftsman” or “surveyor” don't quite explain what a geometra is, a professional without an equivalent in the United States—a liaison among owner, builders, and town planning officials. Ian has assured us that he is the best in the area, meaning also that he has the best connections and can get the permits quickly.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

“I'm mixed on figs. The fleshy quality feels spooky. In Italian, il fico, fig, has a slangy turn into la fica, meaning vulva. Possibly because of the famous fig leaf exodus from Eden, it seems like the most ancient of fruits. Oddest, too—the fig flower is inside the fruit. To pull one open is to look into a complex, primitive, infinitely sophisticated life cycle tableau.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun