clock quotes

Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea? 156

- Rupert Chawner Brooke
  'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester'.

Oh, to have a little house! To own the hearth and stool and all! The heaped-up sods upon the fire, The pile of turf against the wall! To have a clock with weights and chains And pendulum swinging up and down, A dresser filled with shining delph, Speckled and white and blue and brown!

- Padraic Colum
c.1907  'An Old Woman of the Roads'.

Most people really believe that the Christian commandments (e.g. to love one's neighbour as oneself) are intentionally a little too severelike putting Kincaid the clockonhalf anhour tomakesure of not being late in the morning.

- So«  ren Aabye Kierkegaard
Journal entry (translated by Alexander Dru,1938).

The day consists of twenty-four hours only. This regulates the size of the house and the ro"  le it has to fulfil. For the twenty-four hour day is short, and our acts and thoughts are spurred on by time. If we were taught to regard the hand of the clock as a beneficent but implacable god, we should order our lives more rationally.

-Le Corbusier pseudonym of  Charles EŁ  douard Jeanneret
  'Twentieth-century living and twentieth-century building'. Collected in Dennis Sharp (ed)  The Rationalists: Theory and Design in the Modern Movement (1978).

   Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, And then thou must be damned perpetually! Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, That time may cease, and midnight never come. Fair nature's eye, rise, rise, again, and make Perpetual day; or let this hour be but Ayear, a month, a week, a natural day, That Faustus may repent and save his soul! O lente, lente currite, noctis equi: The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned. Oh, I'll leap up to my God!Who pulls me down? See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament! One drop would save my soul, half a drop, ah, my Christ.

- Christopher Marlowe
c.1592  Doctor Faustus (published1604), act 5, sc.2.

   Ah! The clock is always slow; It is later than you think.

- Robert William Service
Ballads of a Bohemian,'It Is LaterThanYouThink'.

I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience: it also marks the time, which is four o'clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere. 788

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan
  Mr Puff, of his tragedy 'The Spanish Armada'.The Critic, act 2, sc.2.

'Pray, my dear,'quoth my mother,'have you not forgot to wind up the clock?''Good G?'cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time,'Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?'

- Laurence Sterne
67  Tristram Shandy, bk.1, ch.6.

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshedthey produced Michelangelo, Leonardo daVinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

- (George) Orson Welles
  Harry Lime's speech to Holly Martins as he leaves the great wheel,TheThird Man.This phrase was added to the script by Welles who played Harry Lime.

Covertly the hands of a great clock go round and round! Were they to move quickly and at once the whole secret would be out and the shuffling of all ants be done forever.

-William Carlos Williams
Sour Grapes,'Overture to a Dance of Locomotives'.