Clocks Quotes

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“The Clock on the Morning Lenape Building

Must Clocks be circles?
Time is not a circle.
Suppose the Mother of All Minutes started
right here, on the sidewalk
in front of the Morning Lenape Building, and the parade
of minutes that followed--each of them, say, one inch long--
headed out that way, down Bridge Street.
Where would Now be? This minute?
Out past the moon?
Jupiter?
The nearest star?

Who came up with minutes, anyway?
Who needs them?
Name one good thing a minute's ever done.
They shorten fun and measure misery.
Get rid of them, I say.
Down with minutes!
And while you're at it--take hours
with you too. Don't get me started
on them.

Clocks--that's the problem.
Every clock is a nest of minutes and hours.
Clocks strap us into their shape.
Instead of heading for the nearest star, all we do
is corkscrew.
Clocks lock us into minutes, make Ferris wheel
riders of us all, lug us round and round
from number to number,
dice the time of our lives into tiny bits
until the bits are all we know
and the only question we care to ask is
"What time is it?"

As if minutes could tell.
As if Arnold could look up at this clock on
the Lenape Building and read:
15 Minutes till Found.
As if Charlie's time is not forever stuck
on Half Past Grace.
As if a swarm of stinging minutes waits for Betty Lou
to step outside.
As if love does not tell all the time the Huffelmeyers
need to know.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl

“The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only the electronic clocks but the wind-up kind too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again.
There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling I had to believe whatever clocks said -and calendars.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind... At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme, I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of themselves.”
― Robertson Davies, The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks

“Time can play all sorts of tricks on you. In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults. That's what happened to me. Once upon a time, I was a boy named Hugo Cabret, and I desperately believed that a broken automaton would save my life. Now that my cocoon has fallen away and I have emerged as a magician named Professor Alcofrisbas, I can look back and see that I was right. The automaton my father discovered did save me. But now I have built a new automaton. I spent countless hours designing it. I made every gear myself, carefully cut every brass disk, and fashioned every bt of machinery with my own hands. When you wind it up, it can do something I'm sure no other automaton in the world can do. It can tel you the incredible story of Georges Melies, his wife, their goddaughter, and a beloved clock maker whose son grew up to be a magician. The complicated machinery inside my automaton can produce one-hundred and fifty-eight different pictures, and it can wrote, letter, by letter, an entire book, twenty-six thousand one hundred and fifty-nine words. These words.

THE END”
― Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret

“I miss the floral scent of her hair, the perfume that barely masked the underlying truth of what she was. She was lost time. She smelled of dusty libraries and unwound clocks, salted sand and rain riding on the first rays of dawn. And lilac. When she held me to her, lilac was what I smelled first.”
― Courtney M. Privett, Rain Falls on Malora

“The schoolroom clock was worn raw by stares; and you couldn't look up at the big Puritanical face of it and not feel the countless years of young eyes reflected in it, urging it onwards. It was a dark, old spirit that didn't so much mark time as bequeath it.”
― Tod Wodicka, All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well

“You can hear it in the midst of the night
While your gaze roams the vast plains on the ceiling”
― Erna Grcic, Beneath the Surface

“And so I told myself to take that one. Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. The hands were extended, slightly off the horizontal at a faint angle, like a gull tilting into the wind.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Hell was full of clocks, he was sure of it. There was no torment, after all, that could not be exacerbated by a contemplation of time passing. The large case clock at the end of the corridor had a particularly penetrating tick-tock, audiable above and through all the noises of the house. It seemed to Lord John Grey to echo his own heartbeats, each one a step on the road towards death.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Lord John and the Hand of Devils

“She was lost time. She smelled of dusty libraries and unwound clocks, salted sand and rain riding on the first rays of dawn.”
― Courtney M. Privett, Rain Falls on Malora

“Any clock that can track this sideral schedule proves itself as perfect as God's magnificent clockwork.

Dava Sobel”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

“How could I known then that failure then that failure of ambition is like a long lingering death and that disappoint with your life never goes away? It only grows stronger with the passage of time as the clock ticks off the remaining days of your life, and any residual, hope slips like sand through arthritic fingers.”
― Peter May

“Besides that, his secret - and principal - reason for retiring was to devote himself entirely to his idée fixe, his collection which was becoming ever larger and more complicated. Van Hulle's concern was no longer simply to have beautiful clocks or rare timepieces; his feelings for them were not simply those one has for inanimate objects. True, their outward appearance was still important, their craftsmanship, their mechanisms, heir value as works of art, but the fact that he had collected so many was for a different reason entirely. It was a result of his strange preoccupation with the exact time. It was no longer enough for him that they were interesting. He was irritated by the differences in time they showed. Above all when they struck the hours and the quarters. One, very old, was deranged and got confused in keeping count of the passage of time, which it had been doing for so long. Others were behind, little Empire clocks with children's voices almost, as if they had not quite grown up. In short, the clocks were always at variance. They seemed to be running after each other, calling out, getting lost, looking for each other at all the changing crossroads of time.”
― Georges Rodenbach, The Bells of Bruges

“People create all kind of fancy watches and clocks, never stopping to realize they're building monuments to the greatest of all thieves.”
― K. Martin Beckner, A Million Doorways

“The wind breezed through the neighborhoods and pushed the hands of household clocks. Waves rose and fell with the regularity of a sleeping god's snores. People cupped snowflakes in their hands, scraps of divinity that melted at the human touch, as ephemeral as time. Seasons are only man-made time-traps after all. We can call them what we please.”
― Angela Panayotopulos, The Wake Up

“Unnerved by Miss Salma R's temporal absolutism, the clocks gave up arguing and stopped trying to run the hours in the normal fashion, so that when people looked in their direction to see what the time was, the clocks showed them whatever time they wanted it to be, and in spite of the chronometric havoc that was created by this abdication they still permitted everyone to get home on time.”
― Salman Rushdie, Quichotte

“   "I still can't manage to watch the big hand for more than four minutes," said Valentin, indicating Poucier's clock with a look.
   The other, following the movement of Valentin's eyes, remained open-mouthed; but he turned smartly back to Valentin when the latter continued:
   "After that time, either it's as if I was falling asleep, I don't know what I'm thinking any more and time passes and escapes my control, or else I'm invaded by images, my attention wanders, and it comes to the same thing; time has run out without my feeling it melt away through my fingers."
   Jean-Lockwit nodded understandingly.
   "Pra, pra, pra, pra," said he, "pra, pra, pra, pra, pra, pra, pra, pra, pra."
   Dreaming, he repeated this phrase once again.
   "I watch time," said Valentin, "but sometimes I kill it. That isn't what I want."
   The other raised his arms into the air, and let them fall again with lassitude and compassion.”
― Raymond Queneau, The Sunday of Life

“A flower clock?"
"Yeah. Mum was... is a florist, so I'm using her books on flowers to try to re-create or, well, create Carl Linnaeus's flower clock. He was a guy from the eighteenth century. Basically, each flower in the clock opens at a different time of day."
"Its petals open?"
"Yeah, so flowers have circadian rhythms," Ben says. He's blushing. "I don't know. Sounds stupid now I'm saying it. And it hasn't actually worked yet either. I thought, though, that with climate change and everything, the flowers will start opening at weird times, so it kind of goes beyond everything with, you know... my mum. It'll be, like, the more we damage the world, the more we damage the clock, and time, and, yeah, the future."
"That sounds beautiful, Ben," I say.
"Yeah, I don't know. I mean, what am I going to do with it? What's the point of it, really? Will it go in a gallery and then be, like, sold as prints of photographs of it or something? And then the time element of it will be gone."
"Hmm."
"Sorry," Ben says, and he shakes his head. "I guess I'm in a bit of a crap mood." He looks at me sideways, and nervously laughs to himself. "I mean, I don't know why I just told you all that."
I shake my head. "It's fine. So, what flower's time is it now?" I ask.
Ben looks at his phone. "Ugh, yeah, so that's the other thing. There actually doesn't seem to be a flower for each hour, which is kind of problematic. But the closest to now is the meadow goat's beard. It opens at three."
"Oh, cool," I say. "So right now doesn't exist in flower time?"
"Yeah, I guess it doesn't. I've never thought of it like that.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“A single watch or clock can be a powerful influence on a man, but when a man lives among as many watches and clocks as crowded the tiny, dim shop of Mr Gonzales, some lagging behind, some skipping ahead, but all ticking monotonously on in their witless fashion, the multitude of them may be likely to deprive them of importance, as a gem loses its value when there are too many just like it which are too easily or cheaply obtainable.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Mysteries of the Joy Rio

“Clocks and watches he ficed with marvelous delicacy and precision, but he paid no attention to them; he had grown as obliviously accustomed to their many small noises as someone grows to the sound of waves who has always lived by the sea.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Mysteries of the Joy Rio

“Time had some score of small voices in that shop, some stately and slow as was becoming to their great gar, others garrulous and hurried. All these told out the seconds in an intricate chorus of tickings.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Markheim

“Clocks are as pointless on the Tennessee as poets are on Earth.”
― Andrew Smith

“Souls do not have calenders or clocks to feel your absence. You are like the untouched breath of my life.”
― Sangeeta Das

“Saigon time was fourteen hours off, although if one judged time by this clock, it was we who were fourteen hours off. Refugee, exile, immigrant--whatever species of displaced human we were, we did not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers. But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Trapped in passing minutes, numbers that confine. The tightest grip, they seem to have, these ticking hands of time”
― Natalie Nascenzi, The Aftermath of Unrest

“I'm not totally engaged with the man, rather, the clock on the wall behind him. About six, but ticking slow and tocking even slower.”
― Patrick R.F. Blakley, Drummond: Learning to find himself in the music

“I lift my arm and feel around for the snooze button, the only word I know in braille.”
― Patrick R.F. Blakley, Drummond: Learning to find himself in the music

“It's Time!”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Living in a portion of Tesland that was prone to earthquakes, there was mass fear surrounding the possibility of being crushed by the upper floor of a house. Supposedly, one couldn't waste time – or be wasted by time – if clocks weren't present on the base story of a home.”
― Nikki Elizabeth, Poor Vinnie's Valor