Coffee Table Quotes

“Everything was neat, clean, and normal except for the three-legged cat sitting on the coffee table drinking out of a big ass coffee cup.”

— Robin Kaye

“I'm hungry," Jason grumbled as he stared at the empty plates on his small
coffee table.
Brad groaned, "You practically ate both plates of cookies. How in the hell are
you hungry?"
Jason shrugged leaning back in his chair to watch the game. "I just am.
Leave me the hell alone I'm a growing boy, damn it!"
"Yeah, a growing thirty-one year old boy," Brad mumbled.
"I'm still growing damn it so shut the hell up and feed me!"
"Order something and stop bitching!" Brad snapped.
"You order something. I'm too weak to move.”

— R.L. Mathewson

“I don't have any idea what to wear anymore, so I tried to cover all bases."
"Try skin."
"Little chilly for that."
We looked at each other across the coffee table.
His eyes didn't say, I'd heat you up, and mine didn't say What are you waiting for? He didn't reply, Fuck if I'm making the first move, so I was careful not to say, I wish you would, because I can't, because I'm ... and he didn't snap ... choking on your pride?!
"As if you aren't."
"Excuse me?"
"Really Barrons," I said drily. "I'm not the only one who didn't just not have that conversation, and you know it."
There was the faint, sexy lift of his lip. "You're a piece of work, Ms. Lane."
"Right back at you.”

— Karen Marie Moning

“Imagination They say adults have no imagination. Not true. Just instead of dinosaurs and spaceships, they imagine silence and the new babysitter bent over the coffee table.”

— Bo Burnham

“They go in a vase. On the nighstand by your bed. Or on the kitchen table. Or on the coffee table in the living room. They go where you can see them most often, and, seeing them, remember that you deserve flowers.”

— Faith Hunter

“Just so you know," I inform him, "one day, I'm going to get tired of sharing your affection with that coffee table and I'm going to make you choose." "Just so you know," he mimics me, "I would chop that table up and use it for firewood before I would ever choose anything over you.”

— Katja Millay

“A woman with super long platinum blonde hair, a fake tan, injected bubble gum pink lips, and a large boob job came in. Phoebe showed her where to set up in front of us and we all sat patiently.
"Hello, I'm Tandy" I almost rolled my eyes at her name, given her appearance. She placed a case on the coffee table in front of us, opened it, and pulled out rubber penises. I almost shot my drink out of my nose, again. "I will be instructing you on proper blow job technique."
"Oh my God, Phoebe." I shouted at her.
"Yeah," Viola clapped her hands and reached out to be the first to get a rubber practice penis.”

— Sadie Grubor

“We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif-books in piles and on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are books waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books ... They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables ... I can't imagine a home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading the Aspern Papers, and there it is.”

— Louise Erdrich

“We all share these wishes. But also the way we look for happiness and try to avoid discomfort is the same. Who among us does not enjoy a delicious meal? Who does not wish to sleep in a safe, comfortable bed? Author, monk-or stray kitten-we are all equal in that." Across the coffee table, the history professor shifted in his seat. "Most of all," the Dalai Lama said, leaning over and stroking me with his index finger, "all of us just want to be loved.”

— David Michie

“I sit down in front of Baz now, on the coffee table
which I carried up by myself. He hands me his cup, and I take a sip. "What is this?"
"Pumpkin mocha breve. I created it myself.”

— Rainbow Rowell

“She looked up over Pony's shoulder and saw Noel, and Noel saw her - and he strode straight through the basement, over the love seat and up onto the coffee table and over the couch and through Pony and Simini, and wrapped his arms around Mags, swinging her in a circle. (Midnights)”

— Rainbow Rowell

“But I took a deep breath, and she sat there listening to me across my dirty coffee table, and we talked about community and family and authenticity. It's easy to talk about it, and really, really hard sometimes to practice it. This is why the door stays closed for so many of us, literally and figuratively. One friend promises she'll start having people over when they finally have money to remodel. Another says she'd be too nervous that people wouldn't eat the food she made, so she never makes the invitation. But it isn't about perfection, and it isn't about performance. You'll miss the richest moments in life-the sacred moments when we feel God's grace and presence through the actual faces and hands of the people we love-if you're too scared or too ashamed to open the door. I know it's scary, but throw open the door anyway, even though someone might see you in your terribly ugly half-zip.”

— Shauna Niequist

“On a low coffee table, with circular and semicircular stains bitten into the dark veneer, lay a few wilted numbers of Time and Life. I flipped to the middle of the nearest magazine. The face of Eisenhower beamed up at me, bald and blank as the face of a fetus in a bottle.”

— Sylvia Plath

“If you want, I'll gather all the things I don't mind you smashing and put them on the coffee table, or an alternate option, I can go grab you a bottle of beer, I offered. He”

— Kristen Ashley

“Even after all our frailties and failures, Christ Jesus can hardly wait to acknowledge us before the very angels of God. If He is that unashamed of us in all our imperfections, how can we be ashamed of Him, our Redeemer and Deliverer? So don't duck your head in shame under the coffee table. At one time or another, all of us have faced the temptation to shrink away from openly acknowledging Christ. But I've learned one of the best ways to get over our attacks of shame: do it over and over until it loses its intimidation. The more we practice, the easier it gets!”

— Beth Moore

“Just because something's damaged doesn't mean it shouldn't be treated with respect.'
'Ad,' Wallace said, 'it's a coffee table, not an orphan.”

— Sarah Dessen

“Shut up," I hissed. Ticked that he was taller than me, I stepped up onto a nearby coffee table. "I'm not in a cage anymore," I said, keeping enough presence of mind not to poke him in the chest with a finger. His face went startled, then cloric. "The only thing between your head and my foot becoming real close and personal right now is my questionable professionalism. And if you ever threaten me again, I'll slam you halfway across the room before you can say number-two pencil. Got it, you tall freak of nature?”

— Kim Harrison

“That Chippendale is a coffee table, Lieutenant, not a footstool."
"How do you walk with that stick up your ass?" She left her feet where they were, propped comfortably on the table. "Does it hurt, or does it give you a nice little rush?"
"Your dinner guests," he said, curling his lip, "have arrived."
"Thank you, Summerset." Roarke got to his feet. "We'll have the hors d'oeuvres in here." He held out a hand to Eve.
She waited, deliberately, until Summerset had stepped out again before swinging her feet to the floor.
"In the interest of good fellowship," Roarke began as they started toward the foyer, "could you not mention the stick in Summerset's ass for the rest of the evening?"
"Okay. If he rags on me I'll just pull it out and beat him over the head with it."
"That should be entertaining.”

— J.D. Robb

“Oh, I could never go back to that work, it's so dreary and the last thing the world needs is another coffee table book.”

— Peter Cameron

“When is Colton coming over again?"
I straightened magazines on the coffee table and pretended the subject didn't bother me. "When he realizes the truth about either me or Bryant."
Julianne's head popped up from behind the couch, where Ken and a collection of tiny plastic picnic food had fallen. "When will that be?"
"Oh probably around the same time hell freezes over."
"I thought Colton was your friend," Evelynn said. "I thought you liked him."
"I do-well, I used to." It made me feel sad just to say the words.
Rebecca gave me a long look. "But you're not going to talk to him until hell freezes over?"
I straightened another magazine. "Well, anything is possible. After all, Colton is in the same business as the devil, so he probably has some pull down there. Hell might be cooling as we speak.”

— Janette Rallison

“Colonel Andrews popped his head through the doorway. "Did I hear a sigh?"
Miss Charming screamed and dropped her needlework, and Charlotte jumped in her chair, knocking her knee against a marble coffee table.”

— Shannon Hale

“I grew up with 'Life' magazine on the coffee table, Life cereal on the breakfast table, and the game of Life on the card table. People were just so happy to be alive, I guess.”

— Lorrie Moore

“There were always plenty of newspapers in the house. 'The Times', 'Guardian', 'Daily Telegraph' and 'Daily Mail' were all regular fixtures on the coffee table. I used to enjoy reading 'The Times' editorial pages and the 'Daily Mail' sports pages.”

— Lionel Barber

“After they were both done, the pile of knives and guns on the coffee table looked like they'd cleaned out an armory. I think we have a problem, Dmitri.”

— Nalini Singh

“One of my problems is I am getting so mature that I have to pick up a TV and toss it through the coffee table just to remind people of who I am. I want to go ranting and screaming into the grave.”

— Michael O'Donoghue

“For instance, supposing that the planet earth were not a sphere but a gigantic coffee table,
how much difference in everyday life would that make? Granted, this is a pretty
farfetched example; you can't rearrange facts of life so freely. Still, picturing the planet
earth, for convenience sake, as a gigantic coffee table does in fact help clear away the
clutter-those practically pointless contingencies such as gravity and the international
dateline and the equator, those nagging details that arise from the spherical view. I mean,
for a guy leading a perfectly ordinary existence, how many times in the course of a
lifetime would the equator be a significant factor?”

— Haruki Murakami

“As I sit there flipping through a Sports Illustrated, listening to the easy-listening station Dr. Patel pumps into his waiting room, suddenly I'm hearing sexy synthesizer chords, faint highhat taps, the kick drum thumping out an erotic heartbeat, the twinkling of fairy dust, and then the evil bright soprano saxophone. You know the title: "Songbird." And I'm out of my seat, screaming, kicking chairs, flipping the coffee table, picking up piles of magazines and throwing them against the wall, yelling, "It's not fair! I won't tolerate any tricks! I'm not an emotional lab rat!”

— Matthew Quick

“I got these big coffee table books about Chinese opera from the local library, and I loved looking through them. I loved studying the intricate costumes and figuring out how to 'cartoonify' them.”

— Gene Luen Yang

“I'm always working on a few different stories at once, so there's always some really big coffee table book I'm carrying around.”

— Mo Rocca

“You cannot escape from life. Life is not a book. You can't just set it down on the coffee table and walk away from it when it gets boring or you get tired.”

— Rebecca Wells

“I have a cartoon I'm developing with Adult Swim called 'Monster Town U.S.A.,' so I'm busy doing that. Trying to do a coffee-table book of my photography that's been requested of me a couple of times. I'm constantly busy.”

— Norman Reedus

“The decor bowled me over. Everywhere I looked, there was something more to see. Botanical prints, a cross section of pomegranates, a passionflower vine and its fruit. Stacks of thick books on art and design and a collection of glass paperweights filled the coffee table. It was enormously beautiful, a sensibility I'd never encountered anywhere, a relaxed luxury. I could feel my mother's contemptuous gaze falling on the cluttered surfaces, but I was tired of three white flowers in a glass vase. There was more to life than that.”

— Janet Fitch

“Calvin is hammering nails into coffee table.
Mom: CALVIN WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THE COFFEE TABLE?!?
Calvin: Is this some sort of trick question, or what?”

— Bill Watterson

“I love detail, like drawing what's on top of someone's coffee table. Maybe there's a little bowl of butterscotch candies on it, next to the four TV remotes.”

— Roz Chast

“I spent a long time experimenting, saying, 'Here's a record that's free, or $5 if you want a nice version or $250 if you'd like a really nice coffee-table thing.' Everything felt like the right thing to do at the time and then six months later would feel tired. And I would feel tired. So that's one reason for returning to a major label.”

— Trent Reznor

“Downstairs, entertaining company, Desdemona heard her son's clarinet and, as if orchestrating a harmony, let out a long sigh. For the last forty-five minutes Gus and Georgia Vasilakis and their daughter Gaia had been sitting in the living room. It was Sunday afternoon. On the coffee table a dish of rose jelly reflected light from the sparkling glasses of wine the adults were drinking. Gaia nursed a glass of lukewarm Vernor's ginger ale. An open tin of butter cookies sat on the table.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“The only food he has ever stolen has been down on a coffee table. He claims that he genuinely believed it to be a table meant for dogs.”

— Jean Little

“Countermovements among racists and sexists and nazifiers are just as relentless as dirt on a coffee table ... Every housewife knows that if you don't sooner or later dust ... the whole place will be dirty again.”

— Florynce Kennedy

“I like to go to the frat house and drink with my white friends, because anytime you go drinking at the frat house, white boys bring you a drink and hand it to you like it's a top CIA secret. They'll hand me my drink, and I'll go, 'Man, what the hell is in this?' 'Dude, don't worry. Don't ask, just drink it. I'll see you in 20 minutes.' Next thing you know, I'm buck naked, standing on a coffee table, with a cowboy hat.”

— Aries Spears

“If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip ... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears ...”

— Arnold Schoenberg

“Perhaps the worst example of Smithsonian contempt for Jesus Christ is seen in its 1994 publication of a coffee-table book entitled Smithsonian Time Lines of the Ancient World ... This flagrant display of religious bigotry and discrimination in a book officially sponsored by the Smithsonian is intellectually and academically dishonest.”

— Tim LaHaye

“I've met Bob Dylan's bodyguards, and if Steve Earle thinks he can stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table, he's sadly mistaken,”

— Townes Van Zandt

“I was incredibly depressed and I found myself avoiding doing interviews where my [20-something daughters] could hear me - or leaving books on the coffee table they could see.”

— John H Richardson

“In adolescence, it's 'How do I fit in?' In your 20s, 'What do I want to do?' Your 30s, 'Is this what I'm meant to do?' I think the trick is living the questions. Not worrying so much about what's ahead but rather sitting in the gray area; being okay with where you are. If you can find the parity between 'Where am I going?' and 'What's my purpose?' you've got two pretty solid pillars for your coffee table.”

— Chris Pine

“Oh, my tattered rags are caught on your coffee table.”

— Homer

“That's all very well as an abstract moral principle, Avril, a coffee-table theoretical construct, but there's no denying the sheer gratuitous pleasure to be derived from seeing members of the ruling class in pain and torment.”

— Irvine Welsh

“You might be a redneck if your coffee table used to be a telephone cable spool.”

— Jeff Foxworthy

“I'm having my house repainted and we have a piano in the corner and the painter says, Is that y'all's piano? I said, No, that's our coffee table; it just has buck teeth. Here's Your Sign.”

— Jeff Foxworthy

“I love furniture. And I thought, why are we not seeing who's making the cool new coffee table and these new designs that come out?”

— Ellen DeGeneres

“I must say, some are not very beautifully made. They're coffee-table books for people who drink alcohol. I have nothing against coffee-table books as long as they are well done. They must not look like gravestones on a table. Sometimes they are too big, they come in boxes and things like this. No, a book has to be easy to open and you don't have to be a bodybuilder to lift it. I like books I can read in bed. Those big tombstones would kill me.”

— Karl Lagerfeld