Ashley Bird

“These are some of my favorite smells: toasting bagel, freshly cut figs, the bergamot in good Earl Grey tea, a jar of whole soybeans slowly turning beneath a tropical sun.
You'd expect the latter to smell salty, meaty, flaccid- like what you'd smell if you unscrewed the red cap of the bottle on a table in your neighborhood Chinese restaurant and stuck your nose in as far as it would go. But real, fermenting soybeans smell nothing like sauce in a plastic bottle. Tangy and pungent, like rising bread or wet earth, these soybeans smell of history, of life, of tiny, patient movements, unseen by the naked eye.”
― Kirstin Chen, Soy Sauce for Beginners

“Iced tea! Nothing is half so refreshing as a glass of black tea piled high with ice! More than a quencher of thirst, it is a tamer of tempers, a lifter of lethargy, and a brightener of smiles. It is a taste of Winter’s chill, magically trapped in midsummer’s glass.”
― Paul Kortepeter, Tea with Victoria Rose

“She smelled like sun and the drying herbs that hung in the tea shop. She felt like home.”
― Adrienne Young, Spells for Forgetting

“At four o’clock all fighting is paused for half an hour for tea and biscuits.”
― Cassandra Clare, Better in Black