Tea

Tea is an aromatic beverage prepared by adding cured leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant to hot water. The term also refers to the plant itself. After water, tea is the most widely consumed beverage in the world. It has a cooling, slightly bitter, astringent flavour which many people enjoy.

Sourced

• I am so fond of tea that I could write a whole dissertation on its virtues. It comforts and enlivens without the risks attendant on spirituous liquors. Gentle herb! Let the florid grape yield to thee. Thy soft influence is a more safe inspirer of social joy.
  • James Boswell, Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763. James Boswell, Frederick Albert Pottle. Yale University Press, 2004. ISBN 0300093012, page 189.

• Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea.
  • Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret (1862), Ch. XXV.

• Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
  And is there honey still for tea?
  • Rupert Brooke, "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" (May 1912), concluding lines.

• Picture you upon my knee,
  Just tea for two and two for tea,
  Just me for you and you for me, alone!
  • Irving Caesar, lyrics for "Tea for Two" in the musical No, No, Nanette (1925), Act II.

• Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
  How I wonder what you're at!
  Up above the world you fly,
  Like a teatray in the sky.
  • Lewis Carroll, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat", in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Ch. 7.

• Matrons, who toss the cup, and see
  The grounds of fate in grounds of tea.
  • Charles Churchill, The Ghost (1763), Book I, line 117.

• Tea! thou soft, thou sober, sage, and venerable liquid, * * * thou female tongue-running, smile-smoothing, heart-opening, wink-tippling cordial, to whose glorious insipidity I owe the happiest moment of my life, let me fall prostrate.
  • Colley Cibber, The Lady's Last Stake (1707), Act I, scene 1.

• I view tea drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an en-genderer of effeminancy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and maker of misery for old age. Thus he makes that miserable progress towards that death which he finds ten or fifteen years sooner than he would have found it if he had made his wife brew beer instead of making tea.
  • William Cobbett, Cottage Economy (1821).

• Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
  Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
  And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
  Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,
  That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
  So let us welcome peaceful evening in.
  • William Cowper, The Task (1785), Book IV, line 36.

• Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.
  • Henry Fielding, Love in Several Masques (1728), Act IV, scene xi.

• Tea's proper use is to amuse the idle, and relax the studious, and dilute the full meals of those who cannot use exercise, and will not use abstinence.
  • Samuel Johnson, Essay on tea (1757). Quoted in: Handbook of Behavior, Food and Nutrition. Victor R. Preedy, Ronald Ross Watson, Colin R. Martin. Springer, 2011. ISBN 0387922709, p. 628.

• You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
  • C.S. Lewis, reported in Little Giant Encyclopedia: Tea Leaf Reading Jacky Sach. Sterling Publishing Company, Inc., 2008. ISBN: 1402756372, p. 102.

• One day I decided to try to have a complete day without tea. I was quite shaken. I was quite disturbed.
  • Morrissey, interviewed for Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea (2013), BBC Televison

• Tea is a work of art and needs a master hand to bring out its noblest qualities.
  • Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea (1906), Ch. II.

• Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country."
  • George Orwell, Smothered under journalism: 1946. Works of George Orwell, Volumen 18, George Orwell, Peter Hobley Davison, Ian Angus, Sheila Davison. Secker & Warburg, 1998, ISBN 0436203774.

• In English society while there is tea there is hope.
  • Arthur Wing Pinero, Sweet Lavender (1888), Act II. London: William Heinemann, 1893, p. 73.

• Soft yielding Minds to Water glide away,
  And sip, with Nymphs, their elemental Tea.
  • Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1712), Canto I.

• Here, thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,
  Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea.
  • Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1712), Canto III, line 7.

• Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.
  • Chaim Potok. Quoted in: 99 Things to Do Between Here and Heaven. Kathleen Long Bostrom, Peter Graystone. Westminster John Knox Press, 2009. ISBN 0664233244, page 61.

• Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? how did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.
  • Sydney Smith, Lady Holland's Memoir (1855), Vol. I. P. 383.

• Tea does our fancy aid,
  Repress those vapours which the head invade
  And keeps that palace of the soul serene.
  • Edmund Waller, Of Tea; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 778.

External links

• George Orwell: A Nice Cup of Tea An essay by author George Orwell describing his own methods of making tea.
• Douglas Adams' humorous article on tea