Quotes About Clocks

Chapter 1 In the bitter cold of a late December night, the gargoyle's sharp gaze scanned restlessly over the deserted streets of Dublin. Not far below, the clock in the tower of St. Patrick's Cathedral began to strike midnight. The sound of the bell reverberated on a breeze brittle with the promise of snow, skittering among the city's chimneys and across frost-kissed slate roofs. Very soon, the rhythm was picked up by other clocks elsewhere in the sleeping city.

Sometimes I come up here at night, even when I'm not fixing the clocks, just to look at the city. I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is one big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.

Even if all the clocks in the station break down, thought Hugo, time won't stop. Not even if you really want it to. Like now.

Four hundred years is but a moment in 10,000 years. Time is curved, time is braided. Throw out your clocks.

Even if all the clocks in the station break down, thought Hugo, time won't stop. Not even if you really want it to. Like now.

Don't forget to turn your clocks back today if you don't want your clocks to be set to the right time.

Mindless, lifeless things can sync spontaneously. The sympathy of clocks taught us that the capacity for sync does not depend on intelligence, or life, or natural selection. It springs from the deepest source of all: the laws of mathematics and physics.

In our universe, we measure time with clocks, and computers have a "clock speed," but the clocks that govern the digital universe are very different from the clocks that govern ours. In the digital universe, clocks exist to synchronize the translation between bits that are stored in memory (as structures in space) and bits that are communicated by code (as sequences in time). They are clocks more in the sense of regulating escapement than in the sense of measuring time.

In our everyday life we move at low speeds in relation to the speed of light and so we do not perceive the discrepancies between the different proper times of different clocks, and the differences in speed at which time passes at different distances from a mass are too small for us to distinguish. In the end, therefore, instead of many possible times, we can speak only of a single time: the time of our experience—uniform, universal, and ordered.

Times are legion: a different one for every point in space. There is not one single time; there is a vast multitude of them. The time indicated by a particular clock measuring a particular phenomenon is called 'proper time' in physics. Every clock has its proper time. Every phenomenon that occurs has its proper time, its own rhythm.

The invention of reliable and recognizable timepieces—clocks and bell towers—liberated workers from the bondage of piecework, which entails regimentation to count the pieces and favors quantity over quality, slavery over free labor.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

It is not that the turret clocks are running faster. What is happening is that our brains are running slower.

It was only some days later, when there arrived word of a similar deviation between the crier and the clock of a third district, that the suggestion was made that these discrepancies might be evidence of a defect in the mechanism common to all the turret clocks, albeit a curious one to cause the clocks to run faster rather than slower.

In fact, when compared against the timepieces normally employed for such calibration purposes, the turret clocks were all found to have resumed keeping perfect time.

The time just passes quickly when we are involved with something that makes us pay more attention in moment than the clocks pointer.

Elixirs should be kept in clocks. Made of bergamot and fumes, this one spreads furtively across the dawn

I am sorry," said the machine, slumping at the shoulders. "I will try to have the right answer, if you will come back later." I put my hand on the creature's shoulder. "It's all right; I don't know, either. But spiders are funny and determined things, and must be treated carefully." "Yes," she said. "It is the same with clocks".

There are so many ways to tell time-one way with clocks and watches and sunsets, or other ways with how many times a person laughs, or what they forget, or how they change their minds about what they care about, or why, or whom.

Why can't we move the clocks ahead to Friday afternoon around 4:00?

Daylight saving time is the practice of adjusting clocks by one hour to make it easier for people in 1918 to tend their crops.

Is Daylight Saving Time a form of time travel?

Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in a chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of time was so far diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced, genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs Rigby and Lowndes to give the information gratis, that is was half-past one.

We sat and drank, each with a separate past locked up in him, and fate's alarm clocks set at unrelated futures -- when, at last, a wrist was cocked, and eyes of consorts met.