Quotes & Sayings About Teacups

Fences, unlike punishments, clearly mark out the perimeters of any specified territory. Young children learn where it is permissible to play, because their backyard fence plainly outlines the safe area. They learn about the invisible fence that surrounds the stove, and that Grandma has an invisible barrier around her cabinet of antique teacups. — Jeanne Elium

Empty teacups gathered around her and dictionary pages fell at her feet. — Nicole Krauss

Millennials in the workplace have been called "orchids"2 (can't survive outside the greenhouse) and "teacups"3 (chip easily and then are ruined), but to me the most prescient metaphor for young adults sent out into the world after being overparented is "veal" - a term coined by Massachusetts educator Joe Maruszczak - meaning they're raised in controlled environments and led, metaphorically, to slaughter. None of us took a course called "how to hold your kid back," but overparenting appears to be seriously poor preparation for life in the work world. In 2014, interested — Julie Lythcott-Haims

His day, usually a jelly-like creature, a shapeless, spineless thing, had attained Mesozoic structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, toward a climax, as a play should, as a day should. He dreaded the moment when the backbone of the day should be broken, when he should have met the girl at last, talked to her, and then bowed her laughter out the door, returning only to the melancholy dregs in the teacups and the gathering staleness of the uneaten sandwiches. — F Scott Fitzgerald

My dear nephew was only in his sixth year when I came to be detached from the family circle. But this did not hinder John and I from remaining the most affectionate friends, and many a half or whole holiday he was allowed to spend with me, was dedicated to making experiments in chemistry, where generally all boxes, tops of tea-canisters, pepper-boxes, teacups, &c., served for the necessary vessels, and the sand-tub furnished the matter to be analysed. I only had to take care to exclude water, which would have produced havoc on my carpet. — Caroline Herschel

In Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality
the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds
the rattling teacups would — Lewis Carroll

Do you guys remember that time when we were all definitely going to die and then Ben grabbed the steering wheel and dodged a ginormous freaking cow and spun the car like the teacups at Disney World and we didn't die? — John Green

Real teacups are too small. No room for sloshing around so they're impossible to carry anywhere. Those cups force you to sit and be seated and do nothing but sip. Maybe that's why ladies in Victorian movies are never DOING anything. Bound to the table by their teacups. Bound to the table by THE THREAT OF MESS. — Ainslie Hogarth

When one of my Japanese teacups is broken, I imagine that the real cause was not the careless hand of a maid but the anxieties of the figures inhabiting the curves of that porcelain. Their grim decision to commit suicide doesn't shock me: they used the maid as one of us might use a gun. — Fernando Pessoa

Belle's mind populated the castle with royalty from all the eras she could imagine:
Recent ones with great powdered wigs and hats in the shapes of fanciful things like ships, great skirts that billowed out, ugly garish makeup on the faces of those who gossiped behind embroidered silk fans.
Renaissance rulers with thick curled collars and poison rings, intellect and conspiracy at every dinner.
Ancient kings and queens in long, heavy dresses and cloaks, wise looks on their faces and solid gold crowns on their heads, innocents in a world they believed to possess unicorns and dragons, and maps whose seas ran off at the edges, beyond where the tygres were.
Of course, maybe around here there were dragons and unicorns. Who knew? They had talking teacups. — Liz Braswell

To me, the housewife who puts her teacups unwashed in the sink because her husband won't wash them, is political. Every act is political: the things you do, as well as the things you omit doing; the things you refuse to do; the things you fail to do; the things you say, as well as the things you don't say. — Ronee Blakley

Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her parents' house, where she washed the same pink-and-yellow teacups and matching gravy boats every day, slept on the same embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog. Because she had been born in May, and because she had a mole on her left cheek, and because her feet were very large and ungainly, the Green Wind took pity on her and flew to her window one evening just after her twelfth birthday. — Catherynne M Valente

Fiestas always began as if they were being held in a parlor, amid teacups. — Warren Eyster

Cell phones, like the other social media constructs of our time, encourage the collecting of so-called friends and contacts similar to how my grandmother used to collect teacups and put them on display in her china cabinet. Only now, the teacups are people, and the china cabinet is Facebook. — Penny Reid

I love Disneyland because the teacups are so awesome. But California Adventure is the best. — Joey King

She stood by the tea-table in a light-coloured muslin gown, which had a good deal of pink about it. She looked as if she was not attending to the conversation, but solely busy with the tea-cups, among which her round ivory hands moved with pretty, noiseless, daintiness. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Later I will see
there is a poem on the back of each wing. Poems that are not about us,
but are about trees and teacups,
fields and glances. Not about us,
but about the things we hold dear.
The moments we both collect
by living our lives, together and alone. Rearranged alphabets, dream-remnant wonder, the seat of our love. — David Levithan

In lecturing on cookery, as on housebuilding, I divide the subject into, not four, but five grand elements: first, Bread; second,Butter; third, Meat; fourth, Vegetables; and fifth, Tea
by which I mean, generically, all sorts of warm, comfortable drinks served out in teacups, whether they be called tea, coffee, chocolate, broma, or what not. I affirm that, if these five departments are all perfect, the great ends of domestic cookery are answered, so far as the comfort and well-being of life are concerned. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

I went to the trash pile at Tuskegee Institute and started my laboratory with bottles, old fruit jars and any other thing I found I could use ... [The early efforts were] worked out almost wholly on top of my flat topped writing desk and with teacups, glasses, bottles and reagents I made myself. — George Washington Carver

This is all lie, she want to say to them. The dead are not hovering nearby to knock politely at teacups and tabletops and whisper through billowing curtains. — Erin Morgenstern

Two old people in a room devoid of furniture, steam rising from their teacups. They were motionless and expressionless. Waiting for something. I wish I could go into their room and sit down with them. I'd give them my Rolex for that. I wish they would smile, and pour me a cup of jasmine tea. I wish the world was like that. — David Mitchell

At eighteen, she already looks like a woman of sorrows and as her breaths start becoming shorter, tired of looking over her shoulder, she only wants to get away from this city where no one can fathom her love- boundless and profane and real, like her skin and her lips and the insides of her thighs. She knows she can smile, smell like the others. Her skin would bleed too if pricked and yet this reality does not belong to the ones sleeping on the platform floor; this reality is hers and her alone. Thus when she puts the mirror back, she rummages in her handbag, searching for that thing called identity: some of it lost somewhere in the railway colony she had just left behind, some in Sudhanshu's left jacket pocket, the rest of it scattered here around broken teacups on railings, totally aberrant and arbitrary. — Kunal Sen

who looked like a kid lining up for the teacups at Disneyland. "You're sure we have to go down through the cathedral to get to the hospital?" said Elise. — Mark Frost

There was a glass-fronted cabinet opposite, filled with plates on display stands and teacups with so many curlicues it was a wonder you could drink from them without cutting your lips. — Patrick Ness

She was the trembler of knees, the spiller of teacups. — Khaled Hosseini

An avalanche descends onto the city. A hurricane. Teacups drift off shelves. Paintings slip off nails. In another quarter second, the sirens are inaudible. Everything is inaudible. The roar becomes loud enough to separate membranes in the middle ear. — Anthony Doerr

I am tired of everyone keeping their secrets so well that they get other people killed. We are all involved in your game, and it seems we are not as easily repaired as teacups. — Erin Morgenstern

I could tell she was snooty. If she leaned her head back any further, her nostrils would act as teacups. — E.L. Todd

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor -
And this, and so much more? - — T. S. Eliot

Myths grow all the time. If I was to listen to the number of times I've thrown teacups then we've gone through some crockery in this place. It's completely exaggerated, but I don't like people arguing back with me. — Alex Ferguson

I think the important thing about sisters is that they share the same minute, familiar life-style, the same little sets of rules. Therefore they can keep house with each other late in life, because they share the same bunch of housewifely prejudices. The important thing about women today is, as they get older, they still keep house. It's one reason they don't die, but men die when they retire. Women just polish the teacups. — Margaret Mead

The Party is a wonderful, marvelous invention, and it has taught us wonderful, marvelous things - chiefly, that we can cause more trouble with less effort by filing complaints than by breaking teacups. — Catherynne M Valente

The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don't know what it is to be quiet. They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joan of Arcs, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharine the Seconds, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamour, and desperation. If they can't agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they'll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of domestic molehills; and social storms in household teacups. Forbid them to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and they'll quarrel with Mrs Jones about the shape of a mantle or the character of a small maid-servant. To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the nosier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex. — Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Isabel is a very talented photographer," she says. "Indeed, I am! I like to take photographs of babies nestling in oversized teacups." I spear a pea with my fork and hold it up. "Or sometimes I dress them in little green pea costumes and arrange them as if they're peering out of gigantic pods. — Lauren Fox

The vast waterfall of history pours down, and a few obituarists fill teacups with the stories. — Marilyn Johnson

His laughter tinkled among the teacups. — T. S. Eliot

People open shops in order to sell things, they hope to become busy so that they will have to enlarge the shop, then to sell more things, and grow rich, and eventually not have to come into the shop at all. Isn't that true? But are there other people who open a shop with the hope of being sheltered there, among such things as they most value - the yarn or the teacups or the books - and with the idea only of making a comfortable assertion? They will become a part of the block, a part of the street, part of everybody's map of the town, and eventually of everybody's memories. They will sit and drink coffee in the middle of the morning, they will get out the familiar bits of tinsel at Christmas, they will wash the windows in spring before spreading out the new stock. Shops, to these people, are what a cabin in the woods might be to somebody else - a refuge and a justification. — Alice Munro

Them again, and all would change to dull reality
the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds
the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep- bells, and the Queen's shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd boy
and the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon, and all thy other queer noises, would change (she knew) to the confused clamour of the busy farm-yard
while the lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place of the Mock Turtle's heavy sobs. Lastly, she pictured to herself — Lewis Carroll

I'm a full grown man and I'm not tall enough to ride a rollercoaster. So I will sit on the teacups, eat my tea and biscuits and reminisce with the cheshire cat who lives in my head. Oh hello Mr. Cheshire, lovely weather this morning. Mr. Cheshire? Oh my god. — Thom Yorke

In every corridor Parwana would see men's eyes snapping to attention when Masooma passed by. She saw their efforts to behave matter-of-factly, but their gazes lingered, helpless to tear away. If Masooma glanced in their direction, they looked idiotically privileged. They imagined they had shared a moment with her. She interrupted conversations midsentence, smokers mid-drag. She was the trembler of knees, the spiller of teacups. Some days it was all too much for Masooma, as if she was almost ashamed, and she told Parwana she wanted to stay inside all day, wanted not to be looked at. On those days, Parwana thought it was as though, somewhere deep inside, her sister understood dimly that her beauty was a weapon. A loaded gun, with the barrel pointed at her own head. Most days, however, the attention seemed to please her. Most days, she relished her power to derail a man's thoughts with a single fleeting but strategic smile, to make tongues falter over words. — Khaled Hosseini