Top 100 Quotes About Clocks
#1. We lost the skyline
We stepped right off the map
Drifted into black space
And let the clocks relapse.
Steven Wilson
#2. [On setting all clocks at varying times in advance...]
A selfless gesture on my part which ensures I am never late, but really only means that I spend time waiting not only for people who are late but also for people who are on time.
Jon Richardson
#3. I'd had nearly four years of experience looking at these clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight to the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years.
John Green
#4. I never wore a watch. I always depend on public clocks, and stores have clocks, but that is strange.
Ben Katchor
#5. There is no transcendent creator in animism, no god who set the clocks ticking and decides which ones to fix when they falter; nothing exists outside of nature. In other words, my philosophy does not require that I believe in something I cannot experience directly.
Emma Restall Orr
#6. The truth is, clocks don't tell time. Time is measured in meaning.
Rene Denfeld
#7. In the end, we all want a wife. But the home has become increasingly invaded by the ethos of work, work, work, with twin sets of external clocks imposed on a household's natural rhythms.
Sandra Tsing Loh
#8. We no longer pay attention to the clocks. Why should we? Noon is the taste of sawdust, and the feel of a splinter under a nail. Morning is mud and crumbling caulk. Evening is the smell of cooked tomatoes and mildew. And night is shivering, and the feel of mice sniffing around our skin.
Lauren Oliver
#9. Our strategy is one of preventing war by making it self-evident to our enemies that they're going to get their clocks cleaned if they start one.
John W. Vessey Jr.
#10. Having designed and built several clocks during my career it suddenly occurred to me that when you look at the face of a clock both hands have the same center.
Kit Williams
#11. The first thing we did was change all the clocks so that her siblings thought it was bedtime, then put them to bed ignoring their plaintive protests that they were not tired. They wept themselves to sleep soon enough.
Meg Cabot
#12. Before it had awoke to die on the instant of its waking, a score of bells and clocks had shouted midday and for a minute after its death, from near and far the clappers in their tents of rusted iron clanged across Gormenghast.
Mervyn Peake
#13. Humankind invented clocks to define eternity just as humankind invented religion to define God.
Suki Michelle
#14. Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#15. Clocks are the enemies of time ... they are the gaolers of day and the turnkeys of night.
Tom Thumb
Lavie Tidhar
#16. Lips half-willing in a doorway. Lips half-singing at a window. Eyes half-dreaming in the walls. Feet half-dancing in a kitchen. Even the clocks half-yawn the hours And the farmers make half-answers.
Carl Sandburg
#17. We had any number of clocks surrounding us, and every one of them at one time or another exhibited a lively sense of humor.
Joshua Ferris
#18. Prior to the institutionalization of standard time, clocks were set using local meridians or local mean time, and they varied widely.
Stacey D'Erasmo
#19. Some folks' tongues are like the clocks as run on strikin', not to tell you the time o' the day, but because there's summat wrong i' their own inside.
George Eliot
#20. My rhymes are like shot clocks,
interstate cops
and blood clots,
my point is your flow gets stopped.
Talib Kweli
#21. I hate clocks. They tick. Other things make noises in their time and need, but clocks mechanically beat the seconds to death.
Kerry Greenwood
#22. We are the women of daylight; of clocks and steel foundries, of drugstores and streetlights, of superhighways that slice our days in two. Our dreams are pale memories of themselves, and nagging doubt is the false measure of our days.
Paula Gunn Allen
#23. Laws and institutions, like clocks, must occasionally be cleaned, wound up, and set to true time.
Henry Ward Beecher
#24. Like the dandelion clocks, all blown and dispersed on the wind, my life has evaporated into the emptiness of a dream; for which I blame my betrayer, that dubious stranger wearing the mask of a once-loved face.
Anna Kavan
#25. Women tell time by the body. They are like clocks. They are always fastened to the earth, listening for its small animal noises.
Anne Sexton
#26. Even stopped clocks are right twice a day.
Paulo Coelho
#27. Don't forget to turn your clocks back today if you don't want your clocks to be set to the right time.
Demetri Martin
#28. Clocks will go as they are set, but man, irregular man, is never constant, never certain.
Thomas Otway
#29. The seams, the laminae between the various worlds the past present and future as well as the living and the nonliving may not be as distinct and clear-cut as we have been taught or as our somewhat arbitrary clocks and calendars have led us to believe.
Rick Bass
#30. We only set the clocks back and forth in the arrogant belief we have some influence with almighty Time.
Dean Cavanagh
#31. I like knowing what makes people tick and wakes me stop ticking, like clocks.
Jay Coles
#32. The clocks had nothing to do with time but were merely instruments, the clicking and ticking of silver and gold and bronze and pinchbeck arrows, a droll and slapstick rhapsody of lies.
Tabitha King
#33. I have an impulse to write all over the orange walls- I need an alphabet of endings ripped out of books, of hands pulled off of clocks, of cold stones, of shoes filled with nothing but wind.
Jandy Nelson
#34. I often set two alarm clocks because I'm afraid the first one won't actually make me get up.
Kurt Andersen
#35. Clocks slay time ... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
William Faulkner
#36. Grimly, she realized that clocks don't make a sound that even remotely resembles ticking, tocking. It was more the sound of a hammer, upside down, hacking methodically at the earth. It was the sound of a grave.
Markus Zusak
#37. Time limits are fictional. Losing all sense of time is actually the way to reality. We use clocks and calendars for convenience sake, not because that kind of time is real.
Leslie Marmon Silko
#38. The sun rose and set in a land of dreams whether the clocks where right or wrong.
Patrick Kavanagh
#39. Clocks and calendars do not exist to remind us of the Time we've forgotten but to regulate our relations with others and indeed all of society, and this is how we use them.
Orhan Pamuk
#40. 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.
Brian Selznick
#41. There are no beautiful clocks. Everything to do with time is hideous.
Robert Aickman
#42. In my dream, all of the collapsed ceilings reformed above us. The fire went back into the bombs, which rose up and into the bellies of planes whose propellers turned backward, like the second hands of the clocks across Dresden, only faster.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#43. I keep my clocks a little fast / so time won't take me by surprise.
Ruth Whitman
#44. The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for nature to follow. Now we just set the clocks an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.
E.B. White
#45. Why not get a job in West Yellow Stone selling buffalo turds? I could make clocks out of them.
Jonathan Evison
#46. Few in these hot, dim, strenuous times are quite sane or free; choked with care like clocks full of dust, laboriously doing so much good and making so much money - or so little, they are no longer good for themselves.
John Muir
#47. The sunrise sky was creeping over the edge of the city in orange-and-scarlet striations, and the clocks were or were not chiming seven.
Scott Lynch
#48. Time clocks rob the world of wild possibility. That's what they're for.
Stephanie Mills
#49. I got these haters like, When he gon' stop?
Maybe a minute after never, start ya clocks.
Lil' Wayne
#50. She had recently turned nineteen. She had been recently nineteen for as long as she could remember. The pawnshop had been hers for a long time, centuries maybe. Clocks and calendars don't work in Night Vale. Time itself doesn't work.
Joseph Fink
#51. A man of correct insight among those who are duped and deluded resembles one whose watch is right while all the clocks in the town give the wrong time.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#52. The role of the United Nations is to set the mental clocks of the world leaders from past problems to the present opportunities and from local power mindset to global welfare mindset.
Amit Ray
#53. If you live long enough, you learn time is an illusion created by men who fear death. The clocks and watches worshipped by those who deny the inevitable. There is power in acknowledging we are not the ones in control.
Amber Kizer
#54. But promises are not clocks. You cannot tell time by a promise.
Anna Schmidt
#55. We may be just two different clocks, that do not tock in unison.
Lang Leav
#56. Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my politics, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the spirit that impels it, clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, liberating, breathing, moving, thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together.
Jeanette Winterson
#57. People no longer live by sun and moon, by wind and stars, but by some slyly contrived conventions known as clocks and calendars.
Matthew Goldman
#58. Nice clothes fall apart. Nice clocks don't work. Bits fall off the nice cooker. It is hard to accept that pricing is unrelated to quality, but it's plainly true. Nowadays, we pay the price that satisfies our particular personality type; and then we live with the painful consequences.
Lynne Truss
#59. That new technologies and techniques would be forthcoming was a fundamental article of Christian faith. Hence, no bishops or theologians denounced clocks or sailing ships
although both were condemned on religious grounds in various non-Western societies.
Rodney Stark
#61. Sounds of life and movement, people getting ready and people giving up, the sound of hope and the sound of hanging on, and behind them all, the quiet, deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks ...
Hunter S. Thompson
#62. We are taught that curiosity is a thing to be feared. But our first trains came from curious minds. As did medicine, and clocks, and first kisses.
Lauren DeStefano
#63. The universe may be timeless, but if you imagine breaking it into pieces, some of the pieces can serve as clocks for the others. Time emerges from timelessness. We perceive time because we are, by our very nature, one of those pieces.
Craig Callender
#64. Alarm clocks were going off in the city now. One after another, sometimes two or three together, they drove their small silver knives into the body of the great dream that sprawled naked on the housetops. Sensual, amiable, and defenseless as it was, it would still take a little while to die.
Peter S. Beagle
#65. I wasn't born an early bird.
It took three different alarms clocks blasting in my ear every morning to wake me up. And on special occasions when I'd sleep through the bird caws, beeping, and extreme drum solos, Stella would have the privilege of yanking me from my bed.
Joddie Zeng
#66. The time flies. The time flies feed on rotting clocks.
Craig Clevenger
#67. No matter what the clocks and calendars say . . . The years between forty and fifty seem to take one. From thirty to forty takes two; twenty to thirty, three. From nine to nineteen takes twenty.
Edna Robinson
#68. There are two kinds of clocks. There is the clock that is always wrong, and that knows it is wrong, and glories in it; and there is the clock that is always right - except when you rely upon it, and then it is more wrong than you would think a clock could be in a civilized country.
Jerome K. Jerome
#69. Put your mouthful of words away
and come with me to watch
the lilies open in such a field,
growing there like yachts,
slowly steering their petals
without nurses or clocks.
Anne Sexton
#70. Clocks need a man to keep them in proper subjection.)
D.E. Stevenson
#71. I get money to kill time/ Dead clocks
Lil' Wayne
#73. Everyone knows that time is Death, that Death hides in clocks. Imposing another time powered by the Clock of the Imagination, however, can refuse his law. Here, freed of the Grim Reaper's scythe, we learn that pain is knowledge and all knowledge pain.
Federico Fellini
#74. 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
Mark Wilkins
#75. In the Land of Memory the time is always Now.
In the Kingdom of Ago, the clocks tick ... but their hands never move.
There is an Unfound Door
(O lost)
and memory is the key which opens it.
Stephen King
#76. Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
#77. The astonishing fact is that similar mathematics applies so well to planets and to clocks. It needn't have been this way. We didn't impose it on the Universe. That's the way the Universe is. If this is reductionism, so be it.
Carl Sagan
#78. Something tells me organizing a protest against your husband's client has got to be even worse than selling his Tiffany clocks.
Sophie Kinsella
#79. Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.
Cyril Connolly
#80. In the industrial age and in analog clocks, a minute is some portion of an hour which is some portion of a day. You know, in the digital age, a minute is just a number. It's just 3:23. It's almost this absolute duration that doesn't have a connection to where the sun is or where our day is.
Douglas Rushkoff
#81. As all clocks need winding, so all human brains and bodies need to be wound up by sleeping.
Julia McNair Wright
#82. Look, just as time isn't inside clocks
love isn't inside bodies:
bodies only tell the love.
Yehuda Amichai
#83. I've always been fascinated by the Chinese. This goes a long way back to my childhood. The Chinese invented money, movable type, clocks, and built the largest ships in the history of the world.
Thomas Steinbeck
#85. When the clocks of midnight squander a generous time, I will go further than Ulysses' oarsmen to the realm of dreams, inaccessible to human nature. From that underwater region, I rescue fragments that I do not begin to understand.
Jorge Luis Borges
#86. You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car, run it backward, have her lifted miraculously back into the windshield, unshatter the glass, go about your day umtouched, some old, lost sweet tasting time.
Colum McCann
#87. Children, those lucky ones to whom clocks are of no consequence but who drift along on the true emotional content of time.
Jim Harrison
#88. I have over a hundred clocks. I've got fancy clocks and clocks from all over the world that people made for me.
Flavor Flav
#89. At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.
E. E. Cummings
#90. I have to tell you I love living in a world without clocks. The shackles are gone. I'm a puppy unleashed in a meadow of time.
Stargirl
Jerry Spinelli
#91. North Korea has declared its own time zone that they are calling 'Pyongyang Time,' and set their clocks back half an hour. So if it's say, 11:40 here now in New York, in North Korea it's still 1925.
Jimmy Fallon
#92. My roses are my jewels, the sun and moon my clocks, fruit and water my food and drink.
Hester Lucy Stanhope
#94. We're clocks, Abelard. Nothing more.
Junot Diaz
#95. Alarm clocks were invented by fork-tongued devils disguised as gremlins wearing snake masks.
Amy Kathleen Ryan
#96. Someone will ask later, sometimes searching for a name, his own or someone's else's why I neglected his sadness or his love ... But I didn't have enough time or ink for everyone. Or maybe it was the strain of the city, of time the cold heart of the clocks ...
Pablo Neruda
#97. English, unlike Hebrew, is read from left to right - as are clocks. The concepts of clockwise and counterclockwise are universal, irrespective of alphabet.
Joshua Cohen
#98. Moist groaned. It was the crack of seven and he was allergic to the concept of two seven o'clocks in one day.
Terry Pratchett
#99. Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance,
Admire the moments
Discuss the late events,
Correct our watches by the public clocks.
Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks.
T. S. Eliot
#100. A world of ticking clocks and creaking floorboards.
Donna Tartt
