A Quote by Frances Mayes

All afternoon in the deck chair, I try to describe to my notebook the colors of the water and sky. How to translate sunlight into words? — © Frances Mayes
All afternoon in the deck chair, I try to describe to my notebook the colors of the water and sky. How to translate sunlight into words?
You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?
It is strange how sad it can be - sunlight in the afternoon, don't you think?
The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.
Maybe I can put it another way... Life, Charlie Brown, is like a deck chair." "Like a what?" "Have you ever been on a cruise ship? Passengers open up these canvas deck chairs so they can sit in the sun... Some people place their chairs facing the rear of the ship so they can see where they've been... Other people face their chairs forward... They want to see where they're going! On the cruise ship of life, Charlie Brown, which way is your deck chair facing?" "I've never been able to get one unfolded.
I try to construct a picture in which shapes, spaces, colors, form a set of unique relationships, independent of any subject matter. At the same time I try to capture and translate the excitement and emotion aroused in me by the impact with the original idea.
The bluebells made such a pool that the earth had become like water, and all the trees and bushes seemed to have grown out of the water. And the sky above seemed to have fallen down on to the earth floor; and I didn’t know if the sky was the earth or the earth was water. I had been turned upside down. I had to hold the rock with my fingernails to stop me falling into the sky of the earth or the water of the sky. But I couldn’t hold on.
As the hours crept by, the afternoon sunlight bleached all the books on the shelves to pale, gilded versions of themselves and warmed the paper and ink inside the covers so that the smell of unread words hung in the air.
A chair's function is not just to provide a place to sit; it is to provide a medium for self-expression. Chairs are about status, for example. Or signalling something about oneself. That's why the words chair, seat and bench have found themselves used to describe high status professions, from academia to Parliament to the law.
When traveling, I usually keep a notebook: when home at my desk, the notebook serves mainly to remind me how little I saw at the time, or rather how I was noticing the wrong things. But the notes do spur memories, and it's the memories I trust. The wine stain on the page may tell me more than the words there, which usually strike me as hopelessly inadequate.
How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see.
The world turns softly Not to spill its lakes and rivers, The water is held in its arms And the sky is held in the water. What is water, That pours silver, And can hold the sky?
In the last 680 million years of the four and a half billion that this planet has existed, life has been determined by two principal forces: the warmth and the diffused energy of the sunlight coming through our atmosphere, and water. Those are the primordial forces of life - sunlight and water.
I go to the House of Lords in the afternoon and try to walk halfway. I may be thinking about what I'm going to write. It's much more satisfying than sitting in a chair.
Beauty’s all around me right here. It’s not in a textbook. It’s not in an equation. I mean, take the sunlight … The colors flow into your lungs, into your bloodstream. You are the colors.
If you ask me to describe my relationship, I mean - words are too clumsy to accurately describe how I feel in that regard, particularly in an interview. It’s a strange thing.
If you ask me to describe my relationship, I mean - words are too clumsy to accurately describe how I feel in that regard, particularly in an interview. It's a strange thing.
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