Holly Hughes > Quotes

“Going home does not come naturally to me. If my father's medium was silence, mine had tended to be escape. But there's no future in escape because the world is round. So the faster you run away, the faster you end up, right back where you started, face to face with whatever you were running from in the first place. Your worst fears, they're always the most patient. They'll wait up for you. That's what makes them the worst.”
― Holly Hughes

“What if it isn’t so much Indianapolis trying to be Brooklyn, as Brooklyn wanting to capture something of Indianapolis?”
― Holly Hughes, Best Food Writing 2016

“Mind Wanting More

Only a beige slat of sun
above the horizon, like a shade pulled
not quite down. Otherwise,
clouds. Sea rippled here and
there. Birds reluctant to fly.
The mind wants a shaft of sun to
stir the grey porridge of clouds,
an osprey to stitch sea to sky
with its barred wings, some dramatic
music: a symphony, perhaps
a Chinese gong.

But the mind always
wants more than it has --
one more bright day of sun,
one more clear night in bed
with the moon; one more hour
to get the words right; one
more chance for the heart in hiding
to emerge from its thicket
in dried grasses -- as if this quiet day
with its tentative light weren't enough,
as if joy weren't strewn all around.”
― Holly Hughes

“Like humidity, the truth thickens all air.”
― Holly Hughes, Best Food Writing 2017

“old-fashioneds made with bone marrow–infused rye”
― Holly Hughes, Best Food Writing 2016

“the real achievement isn’t getting out of the place where you were born to build a new identity for yourself. It’s better to stay put and change the culture—genuinely transform—where you are.”
― Holly Hughes, Best Food Writing 2016

“Under international trade laws, “sardine” covers almost two dozen species of fish (for U.S. products it exclusively means young herring), though the true sardine, from Portugal, Spain, France, Morocco, and Algeria, refers to the young pilchard (Sardina pilchardus) caught in Mediterranean or Atlantic waters.”
― Holly Hughes, Best Food Writing 2010

“It’s my first time in this place. Maybe like you, though, I’ve been here before—anyone who’s walked through Williamsburg or seen an episode of Girls has. It’s a landscape of under-35s, bristling with locally brewed IPAs, restaurant pop-ups, and new kinds of mustard. And everybody—literally everybody—is flaunting freestyle forearm ink. But tonight I’m not in Williamsburg. I’m in Indianapolis.”
― Holly Hughes, Best Food Writing 2016

“Heck, now that there’s more herring (with cream, with onions, with curry sauce), and even more salmon (thick-cut Scottish loins, gravlax, pastrami-style, organic double-smoked Danish), and even sandwiches like the now-famous Super Heebster (whitefish and baked salmon salad, horseradish cream cheese, wasabi-roe), you could argue Russ & Daughters keeps getting better. Especially for those who shopped for 40 years before the place started toasting the bagels. (“Yes, we toast!” says the sign.)”
― Holly Hughes, Best Food Writing 2010

“As a food writer, I’ve found myself both annoyed and a bit mystified that the social-media value of our breakfasts, lunches, and dinners is considered almost as important as their gustatory properties. While the nose never lies—and neither do the taste buds—the eyes do, all the damn time. I”
― Holly Hughes, Best Food Writing 2016

“Then there’s the newish (November) nonfiction book by hot young writer Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals, which details more horrors of factory farming. Like how just one pig farming operation (Smithfield) produces more tons of shit than does the entire human population of California and Texas combined, and how that untreated waste has nowhere to go other than sprayed in a fecal mist into the air and waterways.”
― Holly Hughes, Best Food Writing 2010