Books
15 Literary Quotes About Coffee
It is a truth universally acknowledged that books are better when accompanied by a great cup of coffee. Hot, iced, however you take it, there's nothing like sitting down to enjoy a great book with coffee. Curling up with a book and a cup of your favorite blend is the perfect way to spend a lazy weekend or evening, and it costs you next to nothing. It's a cliche that book-lovers are tea drinkers, because just as many of us are hopeless caffeine addicts who love nothing more than consuming all the coffee we can get our hands on.
As one of those hopeless, coffee-addicted readers myself, I've given up on trying to beat my iced coffee habit and decided to embrace it. For one thing, there are far worse addictions to have, and besides, it's a great reading and writing companion: Ernest Hemingway taught us that. After all, if it works for some of the best writers of all time, who are we to judge?
From Hemingway, to Woolf, to Murakami, here are 15 quotes about coffee and caffeine from books and writers that will make you feel better about your coffee addiction: pour up a cup and dive in!
1. “As long as there was coffee in the world, how bad could things be?”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes
2. "I'd rather take coffee than compliments just now."
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
3. "Even bad coffee was better than no coffee at all."
4. “Adventure in life is good; consistency in coffee even better.”
— Justina Chen, North of Beautiful
5. “No matter what historians claimed, BC really stood for "Before Coffee.”
— Cherise Sinclair, Master of the Mountain
6. “Coffee is a lot more than just a drink; it’s something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup.”
— Gertrude Stein, Selected Writings
7. “I sipped my own coffee, heavy on the sugar and cream, trying to make up for the late work the night before. Caffeine and sugar, the two basic food groups.”
— Laurell K. Hamilton, Cerulean Sins
8. “I went out the kitchen to make coffee — yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The life blood of tired men.”
— Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
9. “Sometimes when you had nothing at all and it was raining and you were alone in the flat, it was wonderful to know that you could have something even though it was only a cup of black and bitter coffee.”
— Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
10. “The fresh smell of coffee soon wafted through the apartment, the smell that separates night from day.”
— Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
11. “I don’t see the point in caffeine without coffee. Or coffee without caffeine, for that matter.”
— Robyn Schneider, The Beginning of Everything
12. "That’s something that annoys the hell out of me—I mean if somebody says the coffee’s all ready and it isn’t."
—J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
13. "How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself."
14. “It is inhumane, in my opinion, to force people who have a genuine medical need for coffee to wait in line behind people who apparently view it as some kind of recreational activity.”
15. “It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write.”
— Ernest Hemingway
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