“They scorned neighbors who drank tea and concocted an entirely fictitious sickness narrative around the beverage; they claimed tea stunted growth, turned men into pygmies, and transformed women into…’God knows what.’ They claimed tea was stomped into chests by Chinese men with dirty feet, that it was infested with bugs.”

“The spirit of the tea beverage is one of peace, comfort and refinement."”

“Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea! How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.”

“Do you have any coffee? (Talon)Ew! No, that stuff will kill you. I have herbal teas, though. (Sunshine)Herbal teas? That’s mulch, not a beverage. (Talon)”

“It was just so in the American Revolution, in 1776, the first delicacy the men threw overboard in Boston harbor was the tea, woman's favorite beverage. The tobacco and whiskey, though heavily taxed, they clung to with the tenacity of the devil-fish.”

“Humans needed water or they would die, but dirty water killed as surely as thirst. You had to boil it before you drank it. This culture around tea was a way of tiptoeing along the knife edge between those two ways of dying.”