Although I am a person who expected to be rooted in one spot forever, as it has turned out I love having the memories of living in many places.
I loved every place I lived and traveled. London, Paris, Rome, Venice. I fell hard for Central America and Mexico. In each country, I had fantasies that I could live there.
May summer last a hundred years.
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.
the house protects the dreamer; the houses that are important to us are the ones that allow us to dream in peace. Guests we've had stop in for a night or two all come down the first morning, ready to tell their dreams.
When I was twelve, I started reading Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee, and - do we dare breathe the name - William Faulkner.
Venice, the most touristy place in the world, is still just completely magic to me.
If you've got a plot the size of a car or a tiny yard in Italy, you're going to be growing tomatoes and basil and celery and carrots, and everybody is still connected to the land.
Whatever a guidebook says, wether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of the place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct.
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.
I was born and grew up in Fitzgerald, way down in south Georgia. It was a mill town and my family ran the cotton mill. My grandfather was mayor many times and my family felt deeply rooted to that spot.
I’ll always marvel at the liveliness of southern speech-so full of metaphor and hyperbole, quirks and vividness.
Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.
The Dream Lover-what a bold, insightful, and enticing novel. And how vigorously Elizabeth Berg brings us the iconoclastic life of George Sand. Berg writes with such intimacy and compassion that I think she must have some shared ancestral DNA with Sand. I savored every page.
Never lose your childish enthusiasm and things will come your way.
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.
Where is it written that houses must be beige? Any dun colored house would look better if painted pineapple, cream, ochre, or even a smart sage.
As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.
Going to Europe as a budding cook opened my eyes to food in a different way. When I got to Italy, the first thing I did was put my little basil plants in the ground and watch them turn into big, healthy bushes.
The urge to travel feels magnetic. Two of my favorite words are linked: departure time. And travel whets the emotions, turns upside down the memory bank, and the golden coins scatter.
After owning a pool, I think the best way to enjoy the water is to have a friend who has a pool.
Memory is, of course, a trickster.
Italy's siren call lures us more and more.
I got the idea that to write books would be the best way to spend a life. I never thought of anything else that seemed like half as much fun, although in my next life I would like to be an architect, too, so I can have an easier time restoring houses.
Living in a small Italian hilltown, and having lived in a small town in south Georgia, I understand that you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking.
