Tea Ritual Quotes & Sayings

We might laugh at the notion of plastic tea sets in the jungle, but it is a time-honored ritual for Western travelers to collect preindustrial artifacts to use as home decorations...Possession of primitive artifacts suggests worldly knowledge, just as in the highland communities of Borneo an electronic wristwatch that plays "Happy Birthday" is the mark of a great traveler. Funny thing how travel can narrow the mind. — Eric Hansen

I pray. I try to find space to process with a walk on the beach, a hike in the hills. Nature is restorative. I also try not to overreact. I grew up in Ireland, and we are big tea drinkers, and I think it's less about the tea itself and more about the ritual and the moment to prepare. — Roma Downey

The only [working] ritual is making tea. I use the loose leaves and drink it by the gallon. — Stephen King

Why are you crying?'
'How can I possibly look good to you? I'm pregnant! I'm really, really pregnant!'
'Of course you are. Why are you crying?'
'Because I'm going to Hawai'i!'
'Yes, you're going to Hawai'i. Come on now, pull yourself together.'
I kept crying.
Darren looked frantic. He stepped back and fumbled for his roguish smirk. 'So, is this a hormone thing?'
'No, it's not a hormone thing! I'm old, Darren! I'm old and pregnant, and I'm going to Hawai'i. Can you understand how that makes me feel?'
He could not.
How could I possibly expect my husband to understand all the bizarre things that happen to a woman in spirit and flesh when a friendly alien takes over her body? He still couldn't figure out why Laurie and I wanted to fly all the way to Hawai'i just to spend a week lounging around the pool, comparing underarm flab, when we could stay home and have the same conversation over the phone for a lot less money. — Robin Jones Gunn

Growing up in Ireland, when my family received important news, good or bad, we would boil water and make tea. It was the first thing I did when my father died in 1984. This ritual allowed me a moment to take in the enormity of what had happened. — Roma Downey

Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization - this tea ritual and the detective novel. — Ayn Rand

An organism exists in its environment in only one mode, that of an open system responding to those segments of its environment to which it is genetically programmed to respond or to which it has learned to respond.
But a self must be placed in a world. It cannot not be placed. If it chooses by default not to be placed, then its placement is that of not choosing to be placed. — Walker Percy

The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes; accession to simple, authentic and refined sensations, a license given to all, at little cost, to become aristocrats of taste, because tea is the beverage of the wealthy and the poor; the tea ritual, therefore, has the extraordinary virtue of introducing into the absurdity of our lives an aperture of serene harmony. Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And, with each swallow, time is sublimed. — Muriel Barbery

Much of my life seems in retrospect to have been spent in the company of putative national leaders passing through the process of being denounced and imprisoned for sedition, as part of the inevitable progression towards the Prime Ministership and the ritual tea-party at Windsor Castle. — James Cameron

The work, the pride in your work, the worth of the work itself ... all those things faded away to the magic-lantern shades they really were when the pain got bad enough. — Stephen King

Every day my mother had tea. My dad has his ritual cigar. They had their evening cocktail. Those rituals were done nicely, with flair and feeling. — John Travolta

Making tea is a ritual that stops the world from falling in on you. — Jonathan Stroud

Stop struggling to be what you already are rather develop what you are or what you have — Akubuiro Chidera

Tea has nothing to do with being hungry," said Nimrod. "For Englishmen, it is like a canonical hour. And almost as much of an important ritual as the tea ceremony in Japan. Except for one thing. With tea, in Japan, recognition is given that every human encounter is a singular occasion which can, and will, never recur again exactly. Thus every aspect of tea must be savored for what it gives the participants. But in England, the significance occurs in the fact that teas is always the same, and will always recur again and again, exactly . For how is the endurance of a great civilization to be measured? — P.B. Kerr

The game in St. Louis has been halted in the fourth inning because of rain. I'll bet they have the jacuzzis going there. — Jerry Coleman

In Japan, I took part in a tea ceremony. You go into a small room, tea is served, and that's it really, except that everything is done with so much ritual and ceremony that a banal daily event is transformed into a moment of communion with the universe. — Okakura Kakuzo

Tea. There is nothing saner than tea, he thought ... Tea was the great leveler. It brought calm, quiet, contentment, warmth. And it was something to do.
... Tea
so normal, so mundane, so hot ...
... The heat and scent of it permeated his head and cleared his mind. He understood completely the attraction of ceremonies grounded in the ritual of drinking tea.
It required both caution and abandonment of the senses. It demanded that you move into it slowly and savor the moment. And it rewarded you with warmth and delicacy of taste and refreshment.
And after you were done, it could parse out your future. — Thea Devine

If I was making a tea advert, I would want to communicate about tea is that it can console you, it can start your day, there is the warmth and the ritual, and you can share it; you make someone a cup of tea and you offer it to them. — Matt Smith

The mock-heroic, in whatever guise. One example, from Alexander Theroux: 'It was high tea: the perfervid ritual in England which daily sweetens the ambiance of the discriminately invited and that nothing short of barratry, a provoked shaft of lightning, the King's enemies, or an act of God could ever hope to bring to an end.' This elaborate banality might serve as a lesson to all fifth-formers. The sentence is a wreck: ugly, untrue and illiterate; even in the interests of pseudo-elegant variation, you cannot start a clause with a which and then switch to a that. — Martin Amis

For me starting the day without a pot of tea would be a day forever out of kilter. — Bill Drummond

Brewing and serving tea is an aesthetic ritual in Iran, performed several times a day. We serve tea in transparent glasses, small and shapely, the most popular of which is called slim-waisted: round and full at the top, narrow in the middle and round and full at the bottom. The color of the tea and its subtle aroma are an indication of the brewer's skill. — Azar Nafisi

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity then they really are. — Henry Fielding

This ... all this, the room, the people here,the odd little pairs and groups they'd formed, the ways each was finding to connect the others ... this was what she fought for. For these people, yes. And for moments like this, punctuated by coffee or tea, with a baby on one man's shoulder and a saint humming over the fireplace ... everyone gathered together to work toward their common goal. She fought for them, and for people she'd never met and never would, people who deserved a chance to make their own moments, built from their own flawed choices, with the people they found. — Eileen Wilks

I do have one very brutal writing ritual. If I'm working in the morning, I don't allow myself a cup of tea until I've written two paragraphs. It's harsh. — Anthony Lane

Tea-making is a ritual that, like the drink itself, warms the heart somehow. — James Norwood Pratt

When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment? — Muriel Barbery

But I refused to mope about for the evening. My little ritual with teacup, familiar chair, and a favorite Dickens story went a long way toward improving my outlook. — Janette Oke

Today I am altogether without ambition. Where did I get such wisdom? — Mary Oliver

Moments like this act as magical interludes, placing our hearts at the edge of our souls: fleetingly, yet intensely, a fragment of eternity has come to enrich time ... When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. — Muriel Barbery

I'd seen the current stage production and the 1975 production of Chicago. I liked them both very much, but I didn't use them necessarily as inspiration. — Colleen Atwood

I was performing my ritual of sipping tea, shooting flirtatious glances and planning murder — Mingmei Yip

It's easier to hang out with the patients in the indoor garden, with its sunlight and picnic tables. Easier to forget that someone's ill when you're not surrounded by the antiseptic reek of hospital-issue debris. — Corrine Jackson