Quotes About Clocks

Watches and clocks measure our perception of time, not time itself.

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.

The thing I'd like most in the world," I said to her, since at this point I might as well go on talking with her, "is to make clocks run backward." The woman gives some ordinary answer, such as, "You only have to move the hands." "No, with thought, by concentrating until I force time back," I say.

In the past, work was defined primarily by putting in time, and secondarily on getting results. We need to flip that model," Ressler told me. "No matter what kind of business you're in, it's time to throw away the tardy slips, time clocks, and outdated industrial-age thinking.

In the past, work was defined primarily by putting in time, and secondarily on getting results. "We need to flip that model," Ressler told me. "No matter what kind of business you're in, it's time to throw away the tardy slips, time clocks and outdated, industrial-age thinking.

Sighs, the rhythms of our heartbeats, contractions of childbirth, orgasms, all flow into time just as pendulum clocks placed next to one another soon beat in unison. Fireflies in a tree flash on and off as one. The sun comes up and it goes down. The moon waxes and wanes and usually the morning paper hits the porch at six thirty-five.

Death Laughs In The Faces Of Clocks

As is well known, when the moon hours lenghten, human beings come adrift from the regularity of their mechanical clocks. They nod at noon, dream in waking hours, open their eyes wide to the pitch-black night. It is a time of magic. And as the borders between night and day stretch to their thinnest, so too do the borders between worlds.

By contrast Hobie lived and wafted like some great sea mammal in his own mild atmosphere, the dark brown of tea stains and tobacco, where every clock in the house said something different and time didn't actually correspond to the standard measure but instead meandered along at its own sedate tick-tock, obeying the pace of his antique-crowded backwater, far from the factory-built, epoxy-glued version of the world.

By contrast Hobie lived and wafted like some great sea mammal in his own mild atmosphere, the dark brown of tea stains and tobacco, where every clock in the house said something different and time didn't actually correspond to the standard measure but instead meandered along at its own sedate tick-tock obeying the pace of his antique-crowded backwater, far from the factory-built, epoxy-glued version of the world.

The first private clocks appeared in the sixteenth century. Thenceforward, time was an abstract measure separated from the traditional rhythms of life and nature.

The clocks are all turned forward from Funny Time to Right Time. I always remember, "Spring back or Fall in.

I once made love for an hour and fifteen minutes, but it was the night the clocks are set ahead.

From "Modern Man" in Every Lyric Tells A Story His life is run by telephones and clocks He changes his women, like he changes his socks He plays to win and sometimes he plays rough Knows a lot about sex but not much about love

A story conducted by the time of a clock and calendars alone would be a story not of human beings but of mechanical toys.

Sitting out there on the porch, I laughed. How funny—to think of us turning our clocks this way and that, importantly telling the sun when to rise and when to set, when we would prefer it to be light and when dark.

We are too aware of numerical time and not aware enough of natural time.

The state of Illinois contained twenty-seven different time zones, Wisconsin thirty-eight. In Pittsburgh the train station had six clocks, and each one showed a different time. When a clock struck noon in Washington, D.C., the time was 12:08 in Philadelphia, 12:12 in New York, and 12:24 in Boston.

Life holds one great but quite commonplace mystery. Though shared by each of us and known to all, seldom rates a second thought. That mystery, which most of us take for granted and never think twice about, is time. Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem as eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it. Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.

Although we strap time to our wrists, stuff it into our pockets, hang it on our walls, a perpetually moving picture for every room of the house, it can still run away, elude and evade, and show itself again only when there are minutes remaining and there is nothing left to do except wait till there are none.

Days were growing short, clocks had long since been dialed back to daylight wasting time... (p62)

The clocks in the hotel, and the clocks outside in the town, all began to strike six as he got into bed, and when the last clock had struck, the vague rumour of innumerable cockcrows rang in his head. And as he fell asleep he heard the first chatter of waking birds.

clock in a jeweller's window gave the time as twenty-three minutes to five. She knew, by the consequential scurry of its second-hand, that it was alive. It was surrounded by other clocks that made mad dead statements of divergent times as if, she thought, to set before her the stages of that day's fruitless pilgrimage.

The sun rose and set in a land of dreams whether the clocks where right or wrong.