“Peter was not very well during the evening. His mother put him to bed, and made some chamomile tea: "One table-spoonful to be taken at bedtime.”

“The good doctor put a spoon of tea into my honey." "You're drinking tea a honey badger made," Jim said. "What did you expect?”

“raking a hand through his hair, he forced his attention to the text she'd left on the coffee table, refusing to dwell on the disconcerting fact that a part of him had taken one look at the lass in such proximity to his bed and said simply: Mine”

“Question your tea spoons.”

“Buttercup's mother hesitated, then put her stew spoon down. (This was after stew, but so is everything. When the first man first clambered from the slime and made his first home on land, what he had for supper that first night was stew.)”

“I am very much obliged to my dear little George for his message - for his love at least; his duty, I suppose, was only in consequence of some hint of my favourable intentions towards him from his father or mother. I am sincerely rejoiced, however, that I ever was born, since it has been the means of procuring him a dish of tea.”

“It made him feel indispensable and needed - even if the fact that Jocelyn didn't appear to care wheather he slept in her daughter's bed or not did underscore that Clary's mother apparently regarded him as about sexually threatening as a goldfish.”

“You don’t let a guy put his hand on your chest, and put his foot on the ball and look into your eyes and tell you a bedtime story. No. sorry.”

“The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.”

“Thomas watched him for a few minutes. Pop was good-looking, muscular, and his hair was almost gold even though it was getting a little thin on top. Thomas must have taken after his mother, whoever she was.”