Clocks Quotes

“The Lord made no better clock than a child, and none more bitter. Oh, what beautiful clocks they are.”

“The Clock on the Morning Lenape BuildingMust Clocks be circles?Time is not a circle.Suppose the Mother of All Minutes startedright here, on the sidewalkin front of the Morning Lenape Building, and the paradeof 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 hourswith you too. Don't get me startedon 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 dois corkscrew.Clocks lock us into minutes, make Ferris wheel riders of us all, lug us round and roundfrom number to number,dice the time of our lives into tiny bitsuntil the bits are all we knowand 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 onthe Lenape Building and read:15 Minutes till Found.As if Charlie's time is not forever stuckon 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 Huffelmeyersneed to know.”

“The mechanical clock was self-contained, and once horologists learned to drive it by means of a coiled spring rather than a falling weight, it could be miniaturized so as to be portable, whether in the household or on the person. It was this possibility of widespread private use that laid the basis for 'time discipline,' as against 'time obedience.' One can ... use public clocks to simon people for one purpose or another; but that is not punctuality. Punctuality comes from within, not from without. It is the mechanical clock that made possible, for better or worse, a civilization attentive to the passage of time, hence to productivity and performance.”

“I collect travel alarm clocks. I was in a flea market in France once, in 1994, and I opened up this beautiful Jaeger-LeCoultre folding eight-day winding clock folded into a beautiful case, and I went, 'Wow, man.' And I've been collecting travel alarm clocks since 1994.”

“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.”

“The invention of the mechanical clock was one of a number of major advances that turned Europe from a weak, peripheral, highly vulnerable outpost of Mediterranean civilization into a hegemonic aggressor.”

“Let us crush these so-called biological clocks that give us nothing but fear, and encourage us to make stupid decisions. Let us crush these biological clocks that hurt us and rob us of the fabulous lives that Jesus died to give us. These clocks that not only hurt us, but hurt many generations after us.It is time. We need you.”

“Lefebvre summarises this march of clock-time through society and nature (1991: 95–6). He argues that the lived time experienced in and through nature has gradually disappeared. Time is no longer something that is visible and inscribed within space. It has been replaced by measuring instruments, clocks, which are separate from natural and social space. Time becomes a resource, differentiated off from social space. It is consumed, deployed and exhausted. There is the expulsion of lived (and kairological) time as ‘clock-time’ dominates. Lefebvre describes this changing nature of time in terms of metaphor. In pre-modern societies lived time is encrypted into space as in a tree-trunk, and like a tree-trunk shows the mark of those years that it has taken to grow. While in modern societies time is absorbed into the city such that lived time is invisible or reduced to its methods of measurement. Lived time ‘has been murdered bysociety’ (Lefebvre 1991: 96).”

“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.”