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# Weekend Words: Coffee
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-coffee/
- Published: 2014-06-22T12:40:26.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:33:17.000Z
- Description: Last weekend's Weekend Word was tea; this week, equal time for coffee.
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:03 (2014, 2015, part 1)

![coffee](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/06/coffee.jpg)

Vincent van Gogh, “Pensioner Drinking Coffee” (1882). Lithograph, 428 x 270 mm. Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam. (image via Web Gallery of Art)

Last weekend’s Weekend Word was [tea](https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-tea/); this week, equal time for coffee.

> “A cup of coffee – real coffee – home-browned, home ground, home made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils and will exorcise them all.”  
>  
> **—Henry Ward Beecher**

> “Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.”  
>  
> **—Honore de Balzac, *Treatise on Modern Stimulants***

> “Coffee makes us severe, and grave, and philosophical.”  
>  
> **—Jonathan Swift**

> “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.”  
>  
> **—Dave Barry**

> “Complancencies of the peignoir, and late  
> Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,  
> And the green freedom of the cockatoo  
> Upon a rug mingle to dissipate  
> The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.”  
>  
> **—Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”**

> “I judge a restaurant by the bread and by the coffee.”  
>  
> **—Burt Lancaster**

> “Black as the devil, Hot as hell,  
> Pure as an angel, Sweet as love.”  
>  
> **—Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, on the perfect cup of coffee**

> “After a heated argument on some trivial matter Nancy \[Astor\]… shouted ‘If I were your wife I would put poison in your coffee.’ Whereupon Winston \[Churchill\] with equal heat and sincerity answered, ‘And if I were your husband I would drink it.'”  
>  
> **—Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, *Glitter and Gold***