Great Tea Quotes

“Better three days without food than 1 day without tea “ – Chinese Proverb

From Buffy:

Xander: “Here’s your coffee, brewed from the finest Columbian lighter fluid.”
Giles: “Thank you. Horrible.”
Xander: “Aren’t you supposed to be drinking tea, anyway?”
Giles: “Tea is soothing. I wish to be tense.”
Xander: “OK. But you’re destroying a perfectly good cultural stereotype here.”

Iroh: (Sips tea) Blech! This tea is nothing more than hot leaf juice!

Zuko: Uncle, that’s what all tea is.

Iroh: How could a member of my own family say something so horrible?

“Sharing tea with a fascinating stranger is one of life’s true delights.”
– Iroh

“Tea is the magic key to the vault where my brain is kept.”
― Frances Hardinge

“Tea … is a religion of the art of life.”
― Okakura Kakuzō, The Book of Tea

“In Ireland, you go to someone’s house, and she asks you if you want a cup of tea. You say no, thank you, you’re really just fine. She asks if you’re sure. You say of course you’re sure, really, you don’t need a thing. Except they pronounce it ting. You don’t need a ting. Well, she says then, I was going to get myself some anyway, so it would be no trouble. Ah, you say, well, if you were going to get yourself some, I wouldn’t mind a spot of tea, at that, so long as it’s no trouble and I can give you a hand in the kitchen. Then you go through the whole thing all over again until you both end up in the kitchen drinking tea and chatting.

In America, someone asks you if you want a cup of tea, you say no, and then you don’t get any damned tea.

I liked the Irish way better.”
― C.E. Murphy, Urban Shaman

Uncle Iroh: You’re looking at the rare white dragon bush. Its leaves make a tea so delicious it’s heartbreaking! That, or it’s the white jade bush, which is poisonous.
Prince Zuko: We need food, not tea. I’m going fishing. [exits]
Uncle Iroh: Hmm… Delectable tea, or deadly poison?
[Later when Zuko returns]
Uncle Iroh: Zuko, remember that plant that I thought might be tea?
Prince Zuko: You didn’t.
Uncle Iroh: I did… and it wasn’t. [turns revealing his red, swollen face]
Prince Zuko: Yah!
Uncle Iroh: When the rash spreads to my throat I will stop breathing. But look what I found! [holds up a branch of berries]
Uncle Iroh: These are pakui berries, known to cure the poison of the white jade plant. That, or makaola berries that cause blindness.

“I don’t want tea," said Clary, with muffled force. “I want to find my mother. And then I want to find out who took her in the first place, and I want to kill them.”
“Unfortunately,” said Hodge, "we’re all out of bitter revenge at the moment, so it’s either tea or nothing.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Bones

“Honestly, if you’re given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don’t say ’what kind of tea?” Neil Gaiman