Hummingbird Cake Quotes

“A hummingbird cake, she decided as she turned on the kitchen light. It was made with bananas and pineapples and pecans and had a cream cheese frosting.
She would make it light enough to float away.
She reached over to open the window.
To float to her daughter.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, The Girl Who Chased the Moon

“Gladys loved Mama's red devil cake with chocolate icing, but what I always begged her to fix for my birthday was her rich hummingbird cake with pineapple and bananas and pecans and a real sweet cream cheese icing. Daddy adored that cake too, and I can still hear him telling me before he'd go to work to be sure and cut him a thick slice and wrap it in plastic and put it in the fridge for him.
To this day, I don't know how the cake got its crazy name, and when I finally asked Mama not long ago if she knew, all she did was twist her mouth and frown the way she does when she's exasperated, and tell me not to ask dumb questions, then say, "maybe it's because hummingbirds love red sugar water and the nectar in flowers and anything else sweet. But I can tell you one thing, and that's that I'm not about to put a cake outside to see if hummingbirds'll peck at it.”
― James Villas, Hungry for Happiness

“We visit neighbors across the Holler to borrow flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, butter, eggs, oil, vanilla, walnuts, pecans, bananas, powdered sugar, and cream cheese. I've already got these items in my own kitchen, but Momaw Frost's note makes it clear, the ingredients don't matter as much as where they come from. The trick to curing a wasting disease that develops and worsens with isolation and burnout isn't about the final product at all, but how the baking comes together. The magic is the process. The process is the magic.
A herald of a Southern summertime, hummingbird cake is not ungodly popular or secretly obscure. Its flavors aren't out of the ordinary, if a little odd grouped together, like a small town of eccentric personalities.
Foxe Holler, this community, is the key.
This means explaining to my neighbors why I'm visiting them in the first place: Marigold Frost is dying. The Frosts can't hide anymore. If we never ask for help, no one knows to give it.”
― Ellen Pauley Goff, The Farewitch of Foxe Holler