I went out to the kitchen to make coffee—yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The lifeblood of tired men.
Almost all my middle-aged and elderly acquaintances, including me, feel about twenty-five, unless we haven’t had our coffee, in which case we feel 107.
Know ye this: No aspect of your cooking skill will bring you greater or more lasting pleasure than the ability to prepare the drink that stimulates wit and digestion. Coffee splices all loose ends, greets the cheese gladly, and spreads a mantle of aromatic warmth.
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.
The coffee, when he tried it, was strong almost to the point of being unbearable, but not quite. In short, it was divine.
I once had half a cup, twenty years ago, and I’m still working it off.
I like my coffee / black, my beer from Germany, wine / from Burgundy, the darker, the better. / I like my heroes complicated and brooding, / James Dean in oiled leather, leaning / on a motorcycle.
We engaged in long Dostoyevskian conversations, and drank one black coffee after another. It was the sort of night typical of youth, the sort you can only look back on with shame and embarrassment once you’ve grown up. But God knows, it seems I must have grown up already by then, because I don’t feel the slightest embarrassment when I think back to it, just a terrible nostalgia.
Colin didn’t like coffee. He liked the idea of coffee quite a lot—a warm drink that gave you energy and had been for centuries associated with sophisticates and intellectuals. But coffee itself tasted to him like caffeinated stomach bile.
Years now without coffee, without alcohol, without tobacco. . . . Luckily, there is anxiety, which usefully replaces the strongest stimulants.
Of course I can get through the day without coffee. But let’s all be thankful that today is not the day we find out what that would be like.
“Nurse!” Gay sat up, still dazed, but slowly awakening, in the lovely unaccustomed luxury of sheets. “I’m not mad, and I’m not ill, but I’ve been twenty thousand years away. And I haven’t come back for gruel. Tell me: Is there still some coffee left in the world?”
Rested, shaved, coffee’d, steaked, you will be a different man.
The third cup of coffee was a special weapon in her arsenal, like the brahmastra from the epics, to be wielded occasionally and against the most insidious of enemies, one’s own demons.
I think I’ve reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level.
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.
Presently the smell of coffee began to fill the room. This was morning’s hallowed moment. In such a fragrance the perversity of the world is forgotten and the soul is inspired with faith in the future.
Coffee should be black as Hell, strong as death, and sweet as love.
