A Place in the World Quotes

“Travel is a privilege because it gives you the world you were not given. It allows you to be extant in other versions.”
― Frances Mayes, A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home

“Astounding—we are unconscious of the vast trip we are on every instant of our lives.”
― Frances Mayes, A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home

“It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the hometown or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
― Frances Mayes, A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home

“Traveling became not just travel but a choice of living a new way. I learned to see a place from the inside out rather than as a visitor passing through. Renting houses, apartments, even a boat, turned into a way of asking: What is home here? Who are these people and how has here caused them to be who they are?”
― Frances Mayes, A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home

“The happiness that suffuses my Tuscan days drove my pen. I wanted, with my net, to catch elusive and fragile happiness in images. I was at home in Tuscany. Home free.”
― Frances Mayes, A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home

“Once settled, I loved New York, Boston, San Francisco, every place I lived, but what widened the aperture was where I traveled. London, Paris, Rome, Venice. I fell hard for Central America and Mexico. Unhooked from the South, in each country I now had fantasies that I could upend my life and live there forever. I wrote six books of poetry and a field guide, The Discovery of Poetry.”
― Frances Mayes, A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home

“Home: where and why this house? Is home fixed forever or a moveable concept? How do four walls, utilitarian and convenient, or soulful and evocative, connect with your metabolism and turn into that charged feeling of I’m home? Or is home a quest never to be fulfilled? Down the road not taken—was there a blue door for you to open? Some writer said, “My home is my subjects.” What a floating idea of home. Mine feels more visceral. Most alluring, the places where you feel an immediate, illogical bonding. You wish you lived there but you never will.”
― Frances Mayes, A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home

“Perhaps home is not a place but an irrevocable condition. —James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room”
― Frances Mayes, A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home

“Much about home is imagining home”
― Frances Mayes, A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home

“As much as you own an old house and garden, it owns you. There's a continuum in progress.”
― Frances Mayes, A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home

“The first thing to know about living in an old house: The walls are alive.”
― Frances Mayes, A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home

“I will translate myself into a new language.”
― Frances Mayes, A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home