20 Tea Quotations

Make tea not war.

Monty Python, Flying Circus

Never trust a man who, when left alone in a room with a tea cozy, doesn't try it on.

Billy Connolly

The first sip of tea is the always the best... you cringe as it burns the back of your throat, knowing you just had the hottest carpe-diem portion.

Terri Guillemets




When you have nobody you can make a cup of tea for, when nobody needs you, that's when I think life is over.

Audrey Hepburn

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

Henry James

Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.

Henry Fielding, "Love in Several Masques"




Tea is drunk to forget the din of the world. T'ien Yiheng

Strange how a teapot can represent at the same time the comforts of solitude and the pleasures of company.

Unknown

Drinking a daily cup of tea will surely starve the apothecary.

Chinese Proverb




There is no trouble so great or grave that cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea.

Bernard-Paul Heroux

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.

Alice Walker


Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves - slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.

Thich Nat Hahn


When the news reporter said "Shopkeepers are opening their doors bringing out blankets and cups of tea" I just smiled.  It's like yes.  That's Britain for you.  Tea solves everything.  You're a bit cold?  Tea.  Your boyfriend has just left you?  Tea.  You've just been told you've got cancer?  Tea.  Coordinated terrorist attack on the transport network bringing the city to a grinding halt?  Tea dammit! 

Jslayeruk, as posted on Metaquotes Livejournal, in response to the July 2005 London subway bombings




Tea beckons us to enjoy quality time with friends and loved ones, and especially to rediscover the art of relaxed conversation.

Dorothea Johnson, Tea & Etiquette

Tea… shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly.

Kakuzo Okakura, Book of Tea

When you sit in a café, with a lot of music in the background and a lot of projects in your head, you're not really drinking your coffee or your tea. You're drinking your projects, you're drinking your worries. You are not real, and the coffee is not real either. Your coffee can only reveal itself to you as a reality when you go back to your self and produce your true presence, freeing yourself from the past, the future, and from your worries. When you are real, the tea also becomes real and the encounter between you and the tea is real. This is genuine tea drinking.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Anger: Wisdome for Cooling the Flames

I hope next time when we meet, we won't be fighting each other. Instead we will be drinking tea together.

Jackie Chan, Rumble in the Bronx

Tea. Earl Grey. Hot. And whoever this "Earl Grey" fellow is, I'd like to have a word with him.

Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek, The Next Generation

I always fear that creation will expire before teatime.

Sydney Smith

Make a cup of tea, and put a record on.

Elastica, “All Nighter”

[Image Source]

Traveling is Not an Apotheosis

Drying laundry in the back yard
in Birmingham, UK.

Traveling is not an apotheosis. You do not land in another country and transform into a god. You arrive and remain fully human, having to do the same tasks you do at home—wash dishes, laundry, food shop. Your body has the same needs and limitations—sleep, food, shower, warmth, rest. You still contain all your ugly, hindering emotions—frustration, embarrassment, fear, loneliness, anxiety, apathy, exhaustion.

If we did not have this humanness, then traveling would be a lot easier and a hell of a lot cheaper. There would be no need to pay for hostels or food, allowing more money for another museum, site, club, performance, train. You could adventure 24-7, seeing what that city, desert, countryside looks and smells and sounds like at every hour of the day, never missing a sunrise, because you would have no need for sleep. You could walk across continents, never carried by motor or wing, learning the rise and life and bend of the land, because you would not know weariness or pain.

So many times while traveling I wished that I did not need to eat or sleep. I wished my body did not need wash or rest. I wished I never felt afraid, lonely, or frustrated. I wished I knew what 5am and sunrise looked like in every country I visited. But I did need those things. I did feel those emotions, and I didn’t see 5am or sunrise in every country I visited.

Because I am human, and traveling is not an apotheosis.

But when everything is alien, there is comfort in washing a dish, in folding a shirt. These small tasks and routines give us something familiar and tangible to hold onto. They allow us to know that even if we don’t know the person next to us or the language or the food, at least we know how to do these simple tasks, that at least, at its most basic level, we know how to take care of ourselves; and if we can do that, then we’ll be okay. (And sleep, as much as I have loathed you and cheated on you, at least you’re reliable.) If anything, these needs and emotions, as inconvenient and expensive as they may be, ground us, connect us, letting us know that life is very much the same wherever we go.

Eating sauerkraut in Berlin, Germany.

Yo, BSC, I'm Back!

Here I am at BSC as a senior after studying abroad for my junior year. I’ve been back at BSC one week, and the best part has been running into friends who I have not seen for a year, embracing them, looking into their faces, alive and bright, no longer picture or memory.

The rest has been stranger than expected.

BSC has changed. The people have changed. I have changed. BSC is no longer my tailor-made, velvet glove. I took off those gloves, waved good-bye to my country, and left both far behind. From thousands of miles away, my bare, untraveled hands roughened, exposed to the harsh elements of day after day stretching, molding, bashing my comfort zone wider and wider to include not just all my insecurities, fears, and doubts but to contain a faith in myself that I can go anywhere in this world with a confidence greater than those uncertainties.

Now I’m back, and the gloves are too small, too soft; they don’t feel like mine anymore. BSC doesn’t feel like home anymore, and I no longer know how I fit in here.

Before I left, BSC was the be-all, end-all. Now it’s so small. Physically, it’s minuscule—192 acres with a gate circling the campus, broken only by a single entrance and exit. But it goes beyond the material; what happens here is small. The people, relationships, education, dreams, and endeavors are important, but beyond those pursuits, everything else feels so small as to not even take up space. How much of a calamity can anything here be if the world is so big and so full that it does not even know that BSC exists? This perspective is not depressing; it is liberating, freeing me to focus on and to chase the worthwhile, leaving the rest alone.

Even more than small, BSC feels temporary. Freshman and sophomore year, I never wanted to leave college. Why would I? It’s camp with all your friends, interrupted by the occasional pesky essay. Now I wonder what I am still doing here. I am excited about my classes and love being with my friends, but I am ready to head into that unknown but forward direction of onwards.

Most unexpected of all, I feel older. Of course I am a year older, but I feel older than the majority of my peers who are 21, older than I anticipated I would feel at 21. I’m not signing myself into a nursing home, but my 21 years feel very real, not heavy, but undeniably present and full, undeniably lived.

But for now until May, I am at BSC, and though changed, small, and temporary, I can honestly say, I am very happy to be here.

The color is a little weird, but check out this unseasonable, freak weather.

Scarves don't exist in Alabama in September, nor do umbrellas or hot tea.

It’s like I’m back in England on a fair-weather day.