I was learning, even in my brief time in England, that a cup of tea almost always helped. I didn't know whether it was the caffeine, the warmth, or the simple fact of having someone else do something kind, but a soothing cup of tea in Harriet Dalrymple's cottage was fast becoming my lifeline to sanity.

Have some more tea, dear," Hester said, reaching for the pot and refilling my cup. "I always find that helps.

...I thought he was the man I'd been waiting for. A hero right out of Austen. The one who would finally make everything okay. Only he wasn't real. Like Austen's characters, he was fiction. Mr. Darcy broke my heart.

The smoke rolls along the low ceiling and pours up into the night - a reverse waterfall - like when the kettle boils beneath the plate cupboard.

I like tea so much that I’m considering changing my name to Bergamot so that I can exist in a perpetual state of Earl Grey contentment.

The tea ceremony requires years of training and practice ... yet the whole of this art, as to its detail, signifies no more than the making and serving of a cup of tea. The supremely important matter is that the act be performed in the most perfect, most polite, most graceful, most charming manner possible.