Rieves Deli Quotes

The menu at the Hug Deli included, among other items, the Warm and Fuzzy Hug, the Beverly Hills Air Kiss Hug, and the Gangsta Hug, with side orders of Pinch, Tickle, and Back Scratch. She ordered the Long Uncomfortable Hug, because she thought that was funny, thereby prompting a nut-brown Venice Beach-looking dude to hold on to her, earnestly pokerfaced, for a seeming eternity.
"Are you uncomfortable yet?"
"Fairly, yes."
"Excellent. My work here is done."
She laughed and mounted on her bike, pedalling away from the zany mirage as her gratuitous hugger shouted "Namaste" in her direction. ~ Armistead Maupin

Words are not enough. Not mine, cut off at the throat before they breathe. Never forming, broken and swallowed, tossed into the void before they are heard. It would be easy to follow, fall to my knees, prostrate before the deli counter. Sweep the shelves clear, scatter the tins, pound the cakes to powder. Supermarket isles stretching out in macabre displays. Christmas madness, sad songs and mistletoe, packed car parks, rotten leaves banked up in corners. Forgotten reminders of summer before the storm. Never trust a promise, they take prisoners and wishes never come true. Fairy stories can have grim endings and I don't know how I will face the world without you. ~ Peter B. Forster

I'm going to marry a Jewish woman because I like the idea of getting up Sunday morning and going to the deli. ~ Michael J. Fox

Guy between boyfriends #6 and #7
Paul Diaz, Twenty-Something
He was in her watercolor class, so cute and the sweet kind of shy. They obviously clicked, the attraction thrilling between them, inspiring her to relish the infatuation freshman-style and write his name in her notebook in curvy, flowery script. She gave him openings but guessed he was too timid to ask her out. The day after finals, she ran into him at the deli on campus and thought she had nothing to lose.
"My work is having this fancy dinner party next weekend, the food's supposed to be great. Would you like to go with me?"
"Oh, uh, maybe, I'll have to check," he said. Then, "What was your name again?"
There's always something to lose. ~ Shannon Hale

There's something magical about spending a Sunday night watching real people at a deli, then watching fake people pretending to be real on TV, then engaging in (arguably) false interaction with (arguably) real people on the Internet. Never at any prior point in time has this been possible. ~ Diablo Cody

I used to work, part time, in a deli, in those days when your parents made you work just so you should know what work was like. And you'd make 4, 5, 6, ten dollars. ~ Hector Elizondo

It was clear just how much Tommy loved the city. New York City. The CKY Grocery on Amsterdam had giant, bright red Spartan apples every day of the year, even if it wasn't the right season. He loved that grocery, and the old, shaky Persian man who owned it. Tommy emphatically, yet erroneously believed that the CKY Grocery was the genuine heart of the great city. All five boroughs embodied distinct feelings for him, but there was only one that he'd ever truly romanticized. To him, Manhattan was the entire world.

He loved everything between the East River and the Hudson; from the Financial District up to Harlem; from Avenue A to Zabar's. He loved the four
seasons, although autumn was easily the most anticipated. To Tommy, Central Park's bright, almost copper hues in the fall were the epitome of orange. He loved the unique perfume of deli meats and subway steam. He loved the rain with such verve that every time it so much as drizzled, he would turn to the sky so he could feel the drops sprinkle onto his teeth. Because every raindrop that hit him had already experienced that much envied journey from the tips of the skyscrapers all the way down to the cracked and foot-stamped sidewalks. He believed every inch of the city had its own predetermined genre of music that suited it to a tee. The modal jazz of Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter was absolutely meant for the Upper East Side, north of 61st Street. Precisely between Gershwin and gospel. He loved the view from his a ~ Ryan Tim Morris

We've been here three days already, and I've yet to cook a single meal. The night we arrived, my dad ordered Chinese takeout from the old Cantonese restaurant around the corner, where they still serve the best egg foo yung, light and fluffy and swimming in rich, brown gravy. Then there had been Mineo's pizza and corned beef sandwiches from the kosher deli on Murray, all my childhood favorites. But last night I'd fallen asleep reading Arthur Schwartz's Naples at Table and had dreamed of pizza rustica, so when I awoke early on Saturday morning with a powerful craving for Italian peasant food, I decided to go shopping. Besides, I don't ever really feel at home anywhere until I've cooked a meal.
The Strip is down by the Allegheny River, a five- or six-block stretch filled with produce markets, old-fashioned butcher shops, fishmongers, cheese shops, flower stalls, and a shop that sells coffee that's been roasted on the premises. It used to be, and perhaps still is, where chefs pick up their produce and order cheeses, meats, and fish. The side streets and alleys are littered with moldering vegetables, fruits, and discarded lettuce leaves, and the smell in places is vaguely unpleasant. There are lots of beautiful, old warehouse buildings, brick with lovely arched windows, some of which are now, to my surprise, being converted into trendy loft apartments.
If you're a restaurateur you get here early, four or five in the morning. Around seven or eight o'clock, home cooks, to ~ Meredith Mileti

at keltner's deli, everything was somehow neutralized. they were girls. they were girls with odd names who smoked after school together and maybe sometimes alone. ~ Emily Franklin

The Relics"

I slipped them into my friend's palm  -  
the tiny crucifix, and dove,
from off my mother's pendant watch  -  
and I asked her to walk them up through the brush
toward timberline, and find a place
to hurl them, for safekeeping. Now,
she writes, "I walked up the canyon at dusk,
warm, with a touch of fall blowing down the canyon,
came to an outcrop, above a steep
drop  -  far below, a seasonal
creek, green willows. I stood on a boulder
and held out my hand. I wished your mother all the
love in the world, and I sent the talismans
flying off the cliff. They were so small,
and the wind was blowing, so I never saw or
heard them land." My mother is where
I cannot find her, she is gone beyond
recall, she lies in her sterling shapes
light as the most weightless bone in the body, her
stirrup bone, which was ground up
and sown into the sea. I do not know
what a soul is, I think of it
as the smallest, the core, civil right. And she
is wild now with it, she touches and is
touched by no one knows  -  down, or
droppings of a common nighthawk,
root of bird's foot fern, antenna of
Hairstreak or Echo Azure, or stepped on by the
huge translucent Jerusalem cricket. There was
something deeply right about
the physical elements  -  atoms, and cells,
and marrow  -  of my mother's body,
when I was young, and now her deli ~ Sharon Olds

Who knows how to make love stay?
Tell love you are going to the Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half. ~ Tom Robbins

I think that, people are people. That's why the way I treat the lady working in the deli who slices my ham is the same way I treat my friend who drives a Chrysler. That's why the way I treat the guy who packs my groceries is the same way I treat my rich friends. Because people are people. Some are rich and some are poor, and they're all people. ~ C. JoyBell C.

I have so many strong opinions on the entertainment industry, but if I'm in a deli somewhere, and someone says they love that Adam Sandler movie where he dresses up as his twin sister - well, I don't want to make people feel bad for how they feel about things. I'm always courteous, not mean. ~ Andy Kindler

I change clothes at least three times a day. It's the only way I can justify all the shopping I do. Prada to the grocery store? Yes! Gucci to the dry cleaner's? Why not? Dolce & Gabbana to the corner deli? I insist! ~ RuPaul

In September 1968, Rush played for around 20 people at a small hall in a church basement. We played songs like 'Spoonful,' 'Fire' and 'Born Under a Bad Sign,' and got paid $10. Then we went to a nearby deli and ordered Cokes and French fries and started planning our future. ~ Alex Lifeson

That's the place where the books are made, I thought. That's also where Allen Ginsberg offered a friend of mine a Fig Newton outside a deli in the East Village. By the time I first came to New York, I was already half in love. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Over the course of one's life, Julia, there are actions that pave the way for everything else that comes after, good or bad. Simple moments: Turning right instead of left on the street and running headlong into the man you'll marry. Choosing a ham sandwich instead of soup at the deli and choking on it. Diving into a pool of water and cracking your head on the bottom, paralyzing yourself for life. ~ Wendy Webb

[...] I became a haver-of-authentic emotions, an openhearted, well-adjusted, and thriving person, a dependable employee, a woman who could go out to a deli and order a sandwich and eat it and read the newspaper without thinking of the sentence I AM A GROWN WOMAN, EATING OFF A PLATE, AND READING THE NEWS, because I was not an observer of myself, but a be-er of myself, a person who just WAS instead of a person who was almost. ~ Catherine Lacey

Today the clerk in the fancy deli next door asked me how I was, and I said, 'I have deep longings that will never be satisfied. ~ Mary Gaitskill

Seven years I worked at the Polish deli. It's a very slow deli. So I sat around a lot on my stool at the cashier. And I'd sign my autograph on all the bags I'd put the milk in. Just everyday, practice my autograph. And the manager of the store would take some of them and tape them against the wall. And he'd say, "Some day, I'm telling you, it will be worth something." And I'm like 13, going, "Really?!" And when I go back there, he still has them on the wall. It's very cute. ~ Jenny McCarthy

Jephus Hardy?"
Stunned. My jaw dropped when I saw Cephus Hardy walk up to me in the magazine aisle of Artie's Meat and Deli. I was admiring the cover of Cock and Feathers, where my last client at Eternal Slumber Funeral Home, Chicken Teater, graced the cover with his prize Orloff Hen, Lady Cluckington. ~ Tonya Kappes

Eager toward day!" Striker howled. If Striker could have whistled a tune would have accompanied his ritual salutation, but his teeth were not those of a wandering troubadour, and his own tongue would have been deli sliced at the first "hi-ho". ~ Kevin Moccia

I missed a tuna-fish sandwich with mayo on toasted wheat bread more than anything. Six months after I went vegan, I snuck into a deli and took one home. And, of course, it wasn't nearly as good as I fantasized. It tasted, well, fishy. ~ Kathy Freston

Detroit is a great deli city. If only GM could learn from what the delis in Detroit are doing! The best rye bread anywhere - double-baked, crispy, warm rye that they serve their sandwiches with - and great corned beef. It's a passionate deli town. ~ David Sax

He had decided before the accident not to chase them anymore, but the circumstances of the accident made him fear for Lilia's safety. he would never bring her in, not anymore; all he wanted now was to watch over her. Michaela had been reading his notes for years, but his notes were only part of it: the other part was the way he woke up at night in his bed in Montreal and knew where Lilia was, the way he could glance at a map of the United Staes and realize with absolute, inexplicable certainty that she was in West Virginia, the way he tried to ignore his terrifying clairvoyance and forget where she was and couldn't, the way he knew where she was but had to keep driving south to check, the horror of always being right: he saw her face in the crowd on Sunset Boulevard, he stepped into a hardware store in St. Louis at the moment she stepped out of the deli across the street, he stood on a corner in a run-down neighborhood in Chicago and watched her emerge from an apartment building down the block. After each sighting he returned north more depleted, more frightened, less intact. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

I had a boyfriend who told me I'd never succeed, never be nominated for a Grammy, never have a hit song, and that he hoped I'd fail. I said to him, 'Someday, when we're not together, you won't be able to order a cup of coffee at the fucking deli without hearing or seeing me. ~ Lady Gaga

I started a deli when I was 19 years old. Kevin O's. The sandwiches at Kevin O's were a little like Subway before Subway - fresh baked bread. My best seller was turkey with cream cheese and artichoke hearts. I just made it up. ~ Kevin McCarthy

I'm this high school dropout. I quit in my sophomore year, when I was 15. I worked for a while in a deli, and when I was almost 17, I got married. ~ Mary Beth Whitehead

I am not Jewish, but I think that America invented nothing so fine as deli food. ~ Mike Newell

I do all of the grocery shopping in my little family. I buy cheese, of many different kinds, sliced packaged meats and poultry, bagels, immense quantities of eggs, pre-made fried chicken. Milk. Bacon. It is insane how much dairy, deli and bakery stuff I buy. ~ Ben Stein

Breakfast is so important, so I'll make an omelet with cheese and deli meats, and then I'll eat muesli and yogurt mixed with fruit or oatmeal with fruit - and then a side of baked beans. ~ Andrew Luck

There's a deli around the corner from my office where I'd get a bag of chips with my sandwich, and I was hiding them under my sandwich because I was embarrassed. When I had this epiphany that I was hiding the potato chips from myself, I realized there was an opportunity there. ~ Keith Belling

You can't touch the strippers. Why are you paying to not touch someone? That is weird. How do you win in that situation? That is like walking into a deli, starving, and being like, 'Here's $300 - can I stare at the roast beef? Better yet, I'll sit down in this chair and you can mash it around my mouth and balls. ~ Chris Hardwick

A morning-flowered dalliance
demured and dulcet-sweet
with ebullience and efflorescence
admiring, cozy cottages
and elixirs of eloquence
lie waiting at our feet -

We'll dance through fetching pleasantries
as we walk ephemeral roads
evocative epiphanies
ethereal, though we know
our hearts are linked with gossamer
halcyon our day
a harbinger of pretty things
infused with whispers longing still
and gamboling in sultry ways
to feelings, all ineffable
screaming with insouciance
masking labyrinthine paths

where, in our nonchalance, we walk
through the lilt of love's new morning rays.

Mellifluous murmurings
from a babbling brook
that soothes our heated passion-songs
and panoplies perplexed with thought
of shadows carried off with clouds
in stormy summer rains…

My dear, and that I can call you 'dear'
after ripples turned to crashing waves
after pyrrhic wins, emotions drained
we find our palace sunned and rayed
with quintessential moments lit
with wildflower lanterns arrayed
on verandahs lush with mutual love,
the softest love – our preferred décor

of life's lilly-blossom gate

in white-fenced serendipity…

Twilight sunlit heavens cross

our gardens, graced with perseverance,
bliss, and thee, and thou, so splendid, deli ~ Numi Who

As filthy as any night was, a New York City morning is always clean. The eyes get washed.
Flowers in white deli buckets are replenished. The population bathes, in marble mausoleums of Upper East Side showers, or in Greenwich Village tubs, or in the sink of a Chinatown one-bedroom crammed with fifteen people. Some bar opens and the first song on the jukebox is Johnny Thunders, while bums pick up cigarette butts to see what's left to smoke. The smell of espresso and hot croissants. The weather vane squeaks in the sun. Pigeons are reborn out of the mouths of blue windows. ~ Jardine Libaire

We were breathing sooty air. The soot was composed of incinerated glass and steel but also, we knew, incinerated human flesh. When the local TV news announced that rescue workers sorting through the rubble in search of survivors were in need of toothpaste, half my block, having heard that there was finally something we could actually do besides worry and grieve, had already cleaned out the most popular brands at the corner deli by the time I got there, so at the rescue workers' headquarters I sheepishly dropped off fourteen tubes of Sensodyne, the toothpaste for sensitive teeth.
We were members of the same body, breathing the cremated lungs of the dead and hoping to clean the teeth of the living.(Pg. 53) ~ Sarah Vowell

The belief that success was something that just happened to you, that you just did your thing, and if you were deserving, it was bestowed by the same invisible hand that ensured that the deli would have milk to drink and sandwiches to buy. ~ Adelle Waldman

I began to ponder; this life we had for ourselves, Eric and I, it felt like the opposite of Potage Parmentier. It was easy enough to keep on with the soul-sucking jobs; at least it saved having to make a choice. But how much longer could I take such an easy life? Quicksand was easy. Hell, death was easy. Maybe that's why my synapses had started snapping at the sight of potatoes and leeks in the Korean deli. Maybe that was what was plucking deep down in my belly whenever I thought of Julia Child's book. Maybe I needed to make like a potato, winnow myself down, be a part of something that was not easy, just simple. ~ Julie Powell

I have never really cooked, don't know how to use my dishwasher, and subsist mainly on prepared deli takeout. I don't even eat in restaurants much. ~ Jerry Saltz

He loved the unique perfume of deli meats and subway steam. He loved the rain with such verve that every time it so much as drizzled, he would turn to the sky so he could feel the drops sprinkle onto his teeth. Because every raindrop that hit him had already experienced that much envied journey from the tips of the skyscrapers all the way down to the cracked and foot-stamped sidewalks. ~ Ryan Tim Morris

Zombies?" There was definite interest in that word. "Are you a brother in arms? Do you also kill those brain sucking monsters?" I realized I was talking to someone who probably killed people every day, well not every day because that's excessive. The deli man didn't put enough rare roast beef on his sandwich and so he slit his throat with the dagger he had hidden up his sleeve. I giggled at the thought. Again ~ L.A. Fiore

A Jewish deli should specialize in, first and foremost, Yiddish foods, the foods of the Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews. So, if it's a place that specializes in pizza or chicken wings or diner food and then does a corned beef sandwich on the side, it's not a Jewish delicatessen. ~ David Sax

Whenever I'm in Des Moines, I always make a trip to Manhattan Deli for a sandwich. I spent a lot of time there when I was going to college at Drake, so it's usually my one 'go-to' food stop when I'm in town. ~ Zach Johnson

The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would seriously surprise me. ~ Hugh MacLeod