Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that drinking coffee offers a momentary escape from time, essentially allowing us to indulge in a break that we should ideally reserve for a wiser, older version of ourselves.
Terry Pratchett's quote highlights the idea that coffee serves as a tool for us to momentarily pause our busy lives, often at the expense of our future selves. It points to the irony of seeking comfort in the present while potentially sacrificing deeper, more meaningful moments that come with maturity and experience. The act of enjoying coffee is portrayed as a small theft of time, where we prioritize immediate gratification over long-term reflections and insights that come with age.
In practice
During a break at work, you can share this quote to encourage coworkers to take a moment for themselves.
And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.
They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.
Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind?
For a man's house is his castle, et domus sua cuique tutissimum refugium [and one's home is the safest refuge to everyone].
As a historian of American and African-American religion, I know that the Trayvon Martin moment is just one moment in a history of racism in America that, in large part, has its underpinnings in Christianity and its history. Those of us who teach American Religion have a responsibility to tell all of the story, not just the nice touchy-feely parts.
IT IS TIME THAT WE ALL SEE GENDER AS A SPECTRUM INSTEAD OF TWO SETS OF OPPOSING IDEALS.
Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
I think the 'Terminator' idea is a reasonable one - that is that one day the Internet becomes self-aware and simply says that humans are in the way. After all, if you meet an ant hill and you're making a 10-lane super highway, you just pave over the ants. It's not that you don't like the ants, it's not that you hate ants; they are just in the way.
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