Grandfather Clock Quotes & Sayings

What worried Roosevelt was the inability of ordinary people to see the danger of this proliferation of cogs and cylinders and coins in American life.23 The corrupt power of corporations was increasing at an alarming rate, — Edmund Morris

[Senator]Torricelli [D-NJ] will leave public office with just the clothes on his back, a Rolex watch and other assorted jewelry, a TV set, a couple of racks of Italian suits, some Jets tickets, a grandfather clock and three paper sacks filled with small, unmarked bills. — Ann Coulter

Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods. — Wallace Stevens

Every part I get, I just think I'm so lucky. They're so hard to get, you know. — Laurie Metcalf

The grandfather clock struck the half hour. She must be away. Glancing from Mama to Mrs. Smith to Mrs. Astor, she did the only polite thing she could do.

She rolled her eyes back in her head, exhaled a loud gasp and swooned out of her chair. — Rachel Hauck

When I think about the cause I'm most passionate about, it's all in my music all the time, because I'm always singing about the empowerment of women. Always, even when it's a little love song - it's still about the empowerment of women and this high spiritual nature of love. It's the biggest healer ever. — India.Arie

I wouldst rescue Leandra from the convent, where she is surely held against her will, and place her in thy hands so that thou couldst do with her as thou wouldst and as it pleaseth thee, always, however, adhering to the laws of the chivalry, which commandeth that no damsel shalt have any offense whatsoever committed against her person, — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Finally, I've reached the grandfather clock. Its face has no hands, only the words TIME IS, TIME WAS, TIME IS NOT. Highly metaphysical; deeply useless. — David Mitchell

life. She leaned back in her chair, blinked back a tear and looked at her oak dining room table. The evening had taken her several hours to prepare. She concentrated on the two candles in the center. She watched as the flame flickered and wondered if one of them would go out. She heard the grandfather clock chime and one of the candles finally did burn out. More tears were stinging her eyes as she longingly looked at the door. She was becoming disconsolate and wanted to know what had become of her husband. Even on the most chaotic of days he had never forgotten their anniversary. He had always found a way — S.C. King

It's barely changed since the faceless colour committee originally selected it in 1908 when the first map of the Underground was designed and the Bakerloo conclusively became brown, a very early twentieth-century brown, which brings something of the nineteenth century with it - the colour of Sherlock Holmes's pipe, a Gladstone bag, a grandfather clock. — Paul Morley

I have seen life's purpose, and now it is my own. — Kamahl

When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt's house and slip through into Fillory ... it's like he's opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never ac tually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into something better. — Lev Grossman

His cock swung from side to side like the pendulum of a grandfather clock on speed. — Stephen King

In mind's special processes, a ten-mile run takes far longer than the 60 minutes reported by a grandfather clock. Such time, in fact, hardly exists at all in the real world; it is all out on the trail somewhere, and you only go back to it when you are out there. — John L. Parker Jr.

The only bird that gives the poor a real tumble is the stork. — Wilson Mizner

He was filled with loss and an off-brand of nostalgia for events that were supposed to become part of his past but now wouldn't at all. In the mind's special processes, a ten-mile run takes far longer than the minutes reported by a grandfather clock. Such time, in fact, hardly exists in the real world; it is all out on the train somewhere, and you only go back to it when you are out there. He and Mize had been through two solid years of such regular time-warp escapes together. There was something different about that, something beyond friendship; they had a way of transferring pain back and forth, without the banality of words. — John L. Parker Jr.

At morning, I'm unruffled - I'll sit with my tea and Muse Cat beside me and listen to the soft chime of the grandfather clock ... — John Geddes

You have plenty of time; it's only twelve o'clock."

Passepartout pulled out his big watch. "Twelve!" he exclaimed; "why, it's only eight minutes before ten."

"Your watch is slow."

"My watch? A family watch, monsieur, which has come down from my great-grandfather! It doesn't vary five minutes in the year. It's a perfect chronometer, look you."

"I see how it is," said Fix. "You have kept London time, which is two hours behind that of Suez. You ought to regulate your watch at noon in each country."

"I regulate my watch? Never!"

"Well, then, it will not agree with the sun."

"So much the worse for the sun, monsieur. The sun will be wrong, then! — Jules Verne

I've frequently been asked over the years who Lily Savage was based on and I've always answered that it was no one in particular and she was just a figment of my imagination. The truth, I realise now, is that Lily owes a lot to the women I encountered in my childhood. Characteristics and attitudes were observed and absorbed, Aunty Chris's in particular, and they provided the roots and compost for the Lily that would germinate and grow later on. — Paul O'Grady

, civilization is an ever-changing tacit agreement, culturally inherited, not chosen at birth. Civilization is the invention of man, my big friend. It is a means of ensuring order and structure; it is man's attempt to expunge all and every act of randomness from daily life. The ultimate goal of civilization is determinism, the complete absence of freewill. If everyone adhered to every rule, every demand, every decree of civilization, there would be no accidents, no arguments, no crime! Man would move through his life smoothly, like a well-oiled cog in a grandfather clock. — Peter Jelen

At nine o'clock Mr. Shimerda lighted one of our lanterns and put on his overcoat and fur collar. He stood in the little entry hall, the lantern and his fur cap under his arm, shaking hands with us. When he took grandmother's hand, he bent over it as he always did, and said slowly, 'Good woman!' He made the sign of the cross over me, put on his cap and went off in the dark. As we turned back to the sitting-room, grandfather looked at me searchingly. 'The prayers of all good people are good,' he said quietly. — Willa Cather

I marketed pens - on the phone. But the beauty of the gig was that you had to call these strangers and say, 'Hi, how ya doing?' You made up a name, like, 'Hey, it's Edward Quartermaine from California. You're eligible to receive this grandfather clock or a trip to Tahiti.' You promise them all these things if they buy a gross of pens. — Johnny Depp

I do look for the good in everyone. I also give them a chance to be their best, and I try to cope with my disappointment when they're not — Laura Taylor

The great chasm of memory from her childhood in the intimate country surroundings of Cossethay and the Marsh Farm - she remembered the servant Tilly, who used to give her bread and butter sprinkled with brown sugar, in the old living-room where the grandfather clock had two pink roses in a basket painted above the figures on the face - and now when she was travelling into the unknown with Birkin, an utter stranger - was so great, that it seemed she had no identity, that the child she had been, playing in Cossethay churchyard, was a little creature of history, not really herself. — D.H. Lawrence

The secret of life is getting today right. Everyone can get today right, and if you can do it once you can do it repeatedly. — Stuart McRobert

The parlor was inhabited by a monstrous hog's head (afflicted with droop-jaw & lazy-eye), killed by the twins on their sixteenth birthday, & a somnambulant Grandfather clock (at odds with my own pocket watch by a margin of hours. Indeed, one valued import from New Zealand is the accurate time). — David Mitchell

The grandfather's clock in the corner of the room, I suddenly realized, wasn't getting any younger. It would drop out a tick, and the tick would land inside my head like a rock dropped in a well, and the ripples would circle out and stop, and the tick would sink down the dark. For a piece of time which was not long or short, and might not even be time, there wouldn't be anything. Then the tock would drop down the well, and the ripples would circle out and finish. — Robert Penn Warren

Something rippled round the table: a loosening, a settling, a long sigh too low to hear. Un ange passe, my French grandfather would have said: an angel is passing. Somewhere upstairs I heard the faint, dreamy note of a clock striking. — Tana French

Refusing the false securities of a stable and linear past, such an approach celebrates heterogeneous sensations and surprising associations, random connections, the ongoing construction of meaning and also admits into its orbit the mysterious agency of artifacts, space and non-humans from the past. — Tim Edensor

Aw, man. I'd just shot an angel in the face.I made my way into the foyer and sat down on the stairs. I glanced up at the big old grandfather clock. It was going on ten. My folks would be home soon.
"How was your evening, honey?"
"Killed an angel."
"Well, isn't that nice."
That wasn't happening. Daddy never liked guns in the first place, Mother just pretended to. I was so grounded. — Adrienne Kress

I was shocked and astonished when a daring little girl
a cousin I think
having waited under a group of trees in the avenue, where she knew [my grandfather] would pass near four o'clock on the way to his dinner, said to him, 'If I were you and you were a little girl, I would give you a doll. — W.B.Yeats

A fly sneaks into the heavy hush of the room. Lands on the man's forehead. Hesitant. Uncertain. Wanders over his wrinkles, licks his skin. No taste. Definitely no taste. The fly makes its way down into the corner of his eye. Still hesitant. Still uncertain. It tastes the white of the eye, then moves off. It isn't chased away. It resumes its journey, getting lost in the beard, climbing the nose. Takes flight. Explores the body. Returns. Settles once more on the face. Clambers onto the tube stuffed into the half-open mouth. Licks it, moves right along it to the edge of the lips. No spit. No taste. The fly continues, enters the mouth. And is engulfed. — Atiq Rahimi

Mrs. Weasley glanced at the grandfather clock in the corner. Harry liked this clock. It was completely useless if you wanted to know the time, but otherwise very informative. It had nine golden hands, and each of them was engraved with one of the Weasley family's names. There were no numerals around the face, but descriptions of where each family member might be. "Home," "school," and "work" were there, but there was also "traveling," "lost," "hospital," "prison," and, in the position where the number twelve would be on a normal clock, "mortal peril. — J.K. Rowling

If she was making the right and courageous decisions, he thought, she was nonetheless unhappy and somewhat resentful about doing it — David Halberstam

The house kept its own time, like the old-fashioned grandfather clock in the living room. People who happened by raised the weights, and as long as the weights were wound, the clock continued ticking away. But with people gone and the weights unattended, whole chunks of time were left to collect in deposits of faded life on the floor. — Haruki Murakami

It was I who stayed awake wrestling with the shadows on the ceiling and the taunting of the grandfather clock — Nina G. Jones