Off The Clock Quotes & Sayings

I listen to the grinding whir of the clock, and the creaking of my listing bed, and the sound the phone doesn't make when it's shut off. — Michael Montoure

The faint sound of music filtered into the room, a welcome disruption from the agonizing silence. The soft melody comforted Haven. She relaxed as the tension left her body, but it did nothing to shut off her mind. She lay awake, listening as she stared at the clock, wishing for relief. — J.M. Darhower

A tub was brought in to melt snow for mortar. They heard somebody saying it was twelve o'clock already.
"It's sure to be twelve," Shukhov announced. "The sun's over the top already."
"If it is," the captain retorted, "it's one o'clock, not twelve."
"How do you make that out?" Shukhov asked in surprise. "The old folk say the sun is highest at dinnertime."
"Maybe it was in their day!" the captain snapped back. "Since then it's been decreed that the sun is highest at one o'clock."
"Who decreed that?"
"The Soviet government."
The captain took off with the handbarrow, but Shukhov wasn't going to argue anyway. As if the sun would obey their decrees! — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I finished polishing the clock and picked up one of the figurines next to it. It was in the shape of an angel and on the angel's gown were printed the words: ALMIGHTY GOD, GIVE US SERENITY TO ACCEPT WHAT CANNOT BE CHANGED, COURAGE TO CHANGE WHAT SHOULD BE CHANGED, AND WISDOM TO KNOW THE ONE FROM THE OTHER. What if you couldn't do that? Couldn't change things and couldn't accept them, either? I took hold of the angel's head and snapped it off. And then I snapped one wing off, and then the other. I broke his arms off, too, and then I asked him how serene he was feeling now — Jennifer Donnelly

Life turns on small choices.
A last-minute decision to take a shortcut over a snowy pass.
A shrugging dismissal of the odd-looking man in the long coat standing off to one side.
A decision to postpone a physical exam till a less busy time.
A word spoken with the best intentions.
Looking back, after the lives are destroyed, the blood spilt, the families shattered, and even the courses of nations changed forever, the mistakes that started the doomsday clock ticking down often seem minor, even innocent-even virtuous. So easy to make.
David Eller would give anything-no, everything-to go back and undo those mistakes. But life does not give us that chance. Like everyone else, he has no choice but to dangle from the hand of that clock, trying in vain to pull them backward as they tick inexorably toward zero. — William Carmichael

'Minute to Win It' is a variation on a game show from the 1950s called 'Beat the Clock,' in which contestants won washing machines and fox stoles by doing such pointless stunts as catching a tennis ball in a paper cup or knocking a hat off one's wife's head with a whipped-cream spritzer. — Tom Shales

It was still only nine o'clock when I set off on the last leg of my journey, feeling old and dirty and incapable. You probably know the feeling if you are over eighteen. — Kyril Bonfiglioli

We cannot turn back the clock and relive cherished pastimes. We move beyond our origins. A person must make their way in an evolving social, political, and economic world order. We must not be too quick writing off the influence of our prior experiences, because the long tentacles the past remain vibrant strands within us. While the past does not cast our future in stone, its durable mold shapes our present. The ingrained strumming of our personal histories, sentimental or otherwise, also portents what might come along in our future. — Kilroy J. Oldster

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

I'm not getting any sleep," she said. "I've already given up caffeine. What else can I do?" "Lots of things," I said, prepared to rattle off the tips that I'd uncovered in my research. "Near your bedtime, don't do any work that requires alert thinking. Keep your bedroom slightly chilly. Do a few prebed stretches. Also - this is important - because light confuses the body's circadian clock, keep the lights low around bedtime, say, if you go to the bathroom. Also, make sure your room is very dark when the lights are out. Like a hotel room. — Gretchen Rubin

John Knightley only was in mute astonishment. - That a man who might have spent his evening quietly at home after a day of business in London, should set off again, and walk half a mile to another man's house, for the sake of being in mixed company till bed-time, of finishing his day in the efforts of civility and the noise of numbers, was a circumstance to strike him deeply. A man who had been in motion since eight o'clock in the morning, and might now have been still, who had been long talking, and might have been silent, who had been in more than one crowd, and might have been alone! - Such a man, to quit the tranquillity and independence of his own fireside, and on the evening of a cold sleety April day rush out again into the world! — Jane Austen

Claiming "the budget can't allow it" reminds me of when you walk into a restaurant at a civilized hour like ten o'clock and they say "the kitchen is closed." For years I would hear this, and think, "damn, just a little too late, oh well, thank you, I guess it's Denny's again."
And then one day it hit me: kitchens don't close. Just as at home, at a certain point in the night, I stop using the kitchen
but at three in the morning, if I want to, I still have the ability to go downstairs and "re-open" the kitchen by turning on the stove and opening the refrigerator! Restaurants are not banks; at the stroke of ten an enormous airlock doesn't seal off the kitchen and render the preparation of food an utter impossibility./ No, kitchens can open and budgets are what certain people say they are. — Bill Maher

Somehow, Sydney had an internal clock that told her when time was up. I think it was part of her inherent ability to keep track of a hundred things at once. Not me. In these moments, my thoughts were usually focused on getting her shirt off and whether I'd get past the bra this time. So far, I hadn't. — Richelle Mead

The Praesidium stood on four pillars and for most of its height was square in cross-section. Not far above the dials, however, the corners of the square floor-plan were cleaved off, making it into an octagon, and not far above that, the octagon became a sixteen-sided polygon, and above that it became round. The roof of the Praesidium was a disk, or rather a lens, as it bulged up slightly in the middle to shed rainwater. It supported the megaliths, domes, penthouses, and turrets of the starhenge, which drove, and was driven by, the same clock-works that ran the dials. — Neal Stephenson

There are stories where you must wear out your iron shoes to right a wrong, where children are baked into pies, where jealousy cuts off hands and cuts out hearts. We forget, because the stories end with those ritual words - happily ever after - all the darkness, all the pain, all the effort that comes before. People say they want a fairy tale life, but what they really want is the part that happens off the page, after the oven has been escaped, after the clock strikes midnight. They want the part that doesn't come with glass slippers still stained with a stepsister's blood, or a lover blinded by an angry mother's thorns. If you live through a fairy tale, you don't make it through unscathed or unchanged. Hands — Kat Howard

My alarm went off at five a.m., like always. But instead of rising from the bed to go to the office where I'm a star, I threw the clock across the room, smashing it to kingdom come.
It was annoying anyway. Stupid clock. Stupid beep-beep-beeping — Emma Chase

He turned her ninety degrees. "To get back to the ranger station and your car, you want to go southwest," he said.

Right. She knew that, and she stalked off in the correct direction.

"Watch out for bears," Matt called after her.

"Yeah, okay," she muttered, "and I'll also keep an eye out for the Tooth Fairy."

"Three o'clock."

Amy craned her neck and froze. Oh sweet baby Jesus, there really was a bear at three o'clock. Enjoying the last of the sun, he was big, brown and shaggy, and big. He lay flat on his back, his huge paws in the air as he stretched, confident that he sat at the top of the food chain. "Holy shit," she whispered, every Discovery Channel bear mauling she'd ever seen flashing in her mind. She backed up a step, and then another, until she bumped into a brick wall and nearly screamed.

"Just a brown bear," said the brick wall that was Matt. — Jill Shalvis

What if we take away the cool music and the cushioned chairs? What if the screens are gone and the stage is no longer decorated? What if the air conditioning is off and the comforts are removed? Would his Word still be enough for his people to come together? At Brook Hills we decided to try to answer this question. We actually stripped away the entertainment value and invited people to come together simply to study God's Word for hours at a time. We called it Secret Church. We set a date - one Friday night - when we would gather from six o'clock in the evening until midnight, and for six hours we would do nothing but study the Word and pray. We would interrupt the six-hour Bible study periodically to pray for our brothers and sisters around the world who are forced to gather secretly. We would also pray for ourselves, that we would learn to love the Word as they do. — David Platt

Slow down, and enjoy that stuff if it's possible. Kathy doesn't care what time I leave, only what time I clock out, and she knows sometimes I sleep here when I'm locked out, or have friends over. Everything's cool as long as I clock out on time."
She swallowed that big bite she'd rammed in, and said, "Okay. Jeez, I'm so hungry, this stuff is good."
Ketchup for your fries, miss? I can recommend it - it's my main source of vitamin C."
She smiled. "Sure. What does Kathy do if you clock out late?"
Well, a couple times I've fallen asleep and done it, and gotten off with a warning. Eventually, though, if I made a habit of it, I'd disappear in the middle of the night, and never be seen again, and the only clues the police would have would be a few orange hairs and some enormous shoe prints. But for a few weeks afterward, all over the country, the Quarter Pounders would taste just a little bit more like Lightsburg, Ohio. — John Barnes

Every 30 seconds, it transmitted portions of [a Chopin Polonaise] to tell the world that the capital was still in Polish hands. Angered by the unexpected setback, the German High Command decided to pound the stubborn citadel into submission. In round-the-clock raids, bombers knocked out flourmills, gasworks, power plants and reservoirs, then sowed the residential areas with incendiaries. One witness, passing scenes of carnage, enumerated the horrors: 'Everywhere corpses, wounded humans, dead horses . . . and hastily-dug graves.' . . . Finally food ran out, and famished Poles, as one man put it, 'cut off flesh as soon as a horse fell, leaving only the skeleton.' On September 28, Warsaw Radio replaced the polonaise with a funeral dirge.15 — Norman Davies

There's an aesthetic theme, which is cities at two o'clock in the morning. Not cities packed with people going out to clubs and dancing but desolate, empty streets. It's off-putting but there's a strange comfort to it as well, that desolate urban environment. — Moby

I would ask myself what o'clock it could be; I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his ears amid the silence of the night; and to the delightful prospect of being once again at home. — Marcel Proust

I'm going to call you Rose, he says with resolution, working the back off an old clock. — Lauren DeStefano

I bought a clock, but the big hand broke off of it ... so I just added "ish" to every number. — Demetri Martin

Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year. The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases. The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information - — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner of the living room and now he had a phone in his hand on which he could pretend to throw a scrunched-up piece of paper into a waste bin. The world had waited a long time for that. — Kate Atkinson

What if one of us dies? What happens then?'
I reached around and turned on the light to see the clock: 3:20 A.M. 'I suppose we'd remarry.'
'Just like that!' Jane exploded. She sat up in bed, facing away from me. 'You can't just pick a wife off a shelf.'
'Of course not. I just meant that if I happened to die young I'd want you to be happy.'
'How could I be happy without you? When you get married, you make the biggest decision of your life; you say you're going to spend eternity with one person. So what do you do if that person leaves? What do you do once you've already committed yourself?'
'What do you want me to do?' I asked.
And Jane looked at me and said, 'I want you to live forever. — Jodi Picoult

The indifferent pendulum of the clock kept chopping off the seconds of life, calmly and precisely. — Maxim Gorky

Sullivan had been gone for six months, and the ticking clock in D's head was getting louder and louder the longer Sully stayed off the grid. — Elle Kennedy

The ability of dandelions to tell the time is somewhat exaggerated, owing to the fact that there is always one seed that refuses to be blown off; the time usually turns out to be 37 o'clock. — Miles Kington

I need to recharge creatively, and get off the clock of having to be somewhere just because, and having to keep juggling all these things. — Kenny Chesney

How could I known then that failure then that failure of ambition is like a long lingering death and that disappoint with your life never goes away? It only grows stronger with the passage of time as the clock ticks off the remaining days of your life, and any residual, hope slips like sand through arthritic fingers. — Peter May

You've got no time at all, but it seems like you've got forever. You've got nothing to do, but it seems like you've got everything.
You make coffee and smoke a few cigarettes; and the hands of the clock have gone crazy on you. They haven't moved hardly, they've hardly budged out of the place you last saw them, but they've measured off a half? two-thirds? of your life. You've got forever, but that's no time at all. — Jim Thompson

There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I'd lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock. The threads tighten slightly from Monday to Friday. — Gail Honeyman

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. — William Faulkner

When we so fear the dark that we demand light around the clock, there can be only one result: artificial light that is glaring and graceless and, beyond its borders, a darkness that grows ever more terrifying as we try to hold it off. — Parker J. Palmer

When I was a teenager, I looked at over-fifties with pity and unease: they walked too slow, they talked too slow, they watched TV instead of going out to movies and concerts, their idea of a great party was hotpot with the neighbors and tucked into bed after the eleven o'clock news. But - like most other fifty-, sixty-, and seventysomethings who are in relative good health - I didn't mind it so much when my turn came. Because the brain doesn't age, although its ideas about the world may harden and there's a greater tendency to run off at the mouth about how things were in the good old days. — Stephen King

As the storm came nearer I began to realize that I hadn't made the most of my three years' immunity. In fact, I hadn't done a single thing about cleaning up my life. I was, if anything, an even more logical target for lightning than the last time I was in range. And thunderstorms don't creep up on you at seven o'clock in the morning in a non-thunderstorm country for nothing, you know. I lined up a rather panicky schedule of reforms ...
But as the storm suddenly petered out and went off in the other direction nothing much has come out of it yet. I may have three years more, and these things can't be rushed. — Robert Benchley

I can't have discussions about it anymore, I just can't. When someone asks me if I've found Jesus, I say, 'Yeah, I saw him at a Nirvana concert a couple of years ago.' It's like, Jesus has got things to do, he's got a ten o'clock. He's not going to fix things for me, I have to fix things for myself, so I try and have a sense of humor about it and nobody finds my humor very amusing. We've just got to lighten up on the savior bit, folks. You know, get off the cross, we need the wood. — Tori Amos

On game day, until five o'clock or so, the white desert light held off the essential Sunday gloom - autumn sinking into winter, loneliness of October dusk with school the next day - but there was always a long still moment toward the end of those football afternoons where the mood of the crowd turned and everything grew desolate and uncertain, onscreen and off, the sheet-metal glare off the patio glass fading to gold and then gray, long shadows and night falling into desert stillness, a sadness I couldn't shake off, a sense of silent people filing toward the stadium exits and cold rain falling in college towns back east. — Donna Tartt

Married, married. My ring on your finger. Yours on mine. Till death do us part," he rattles off. "Come on Mabes, it's the next logical step. We've been living together for long enough. It's time to make an honest man out of me."
"We've been living together for five hours," I say, looking at the clock.
He shrugs. "When it's right, it's right. — Lily Morton

Entertaining shouldn't be about showing off. It's all about making people feel comfortable and setting a stage for everyone to have a good time, make new friends, and have stimulating conversations. You want to leave a party thinking: If I hadn't gone to that, I never would have met this wonderful person, or had that delicious meal, or felt that sense of camaraderie with the people I met at the dessert table. You don't want anyone looking at the clock, thinking, When can I leave? — Tim Gunn

I had an amazing childhood, lots of love. But my dad worked his tail off, getting up at 4 in the morning and going off at 5, 6 o'clock, yet he always had time to spend with his kids and his wife. — Criss Angel

There is a night that never comes to an end ...
The clock of the world turns under its own shadow. Midnight is a moving place, hurtling around the planet at a thousand miles an hour like a dark knike, cutting slices of daily bread off the endless loaf of Time. — Terry Pratchett

Come here
and take off your clothes
and with them
every single worry
you have ever carried.
My fingertips on your back
will be the very last thing
you will feel
before sleeping
and the sound of my smile
will be the alarm clock
to your morning ears.
Come here
and take off your clothes
and with them
the weight of every yesterday
that snuck atop your shoulders
and declared them home.
My whispers will be the soundtrack
to your secret dreams
and my hand
the anchor to the life
you will open your eyes to.
Come here
and take off your clothes. — Tyler Knott Gregson

When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong
a freakish incursion
and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are ... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions
in other words, alive. — Jennifer Egan

These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, acording to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly - despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public - to put him to bed, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon. — Christopher Isherwood

Then he looked up, despite all best prior intentions. In four minutes, it would be another hour; a half hour after that was the ten-minute break. Lane Dean imagined himself running around on the break, waving his arms and shouting gibberish and holding ten cigarettes at once in his mouth, like a panpipe. Year after year, a face the same color as your desk. Lord Jesus. Coffee wasn't allowed because of spills on the files, but on the break he'd have a big cup of coffee in each hand while he pictured himself running around the outside grounds, shouting. He knew what he'd really do on the break was sit facing the wall clock in the lounge and, despite prayers and effort, count the seconds tick off until he had to come back and do this again. And again and again and again. — David Foster Wallace

I am very, very sorry to leave you hanging like that, but as I was writing the tale of the Baudelaire orphans, I happened to look at the clock and realized I was running late for a formal dinner party given by a friend of mine, Madame diLustro. Madame diLustro is a good friend, an excellent detective, and a fine cook, but she flies into a rage if you arrive even five minutes later than her invitation states, so you understand that I had to dash off. You must have thought, at the end of the previous chapter, that Sunny was dead and that this was the terrible thing that happened to the Baudelaires at Uncle Monty's house, but I promise you Sunny survives this particular episode. It is Uncle Monty, unfortunately, who will be dead, but not yet. — Lemony Snicket

Seven o'clock and you watched it and then you turned it off. The Fifties. It's like that in movies and television programs, but its plot there. The characters get some information from the newscaster and then they turn it off so they can speak. But we were the characters then. We still are, I guess, so it's only a matter of time before we start seeing television shows where the people turn on the news to get some information and then, instead of turning it off so they can speak, they leave it on, and we get swept into some endless video vortex, some film loop, which has us by the eyes and won't let us go. — Alberto Alvaro Rios

The third kind of loneliness is avoiding unnecesssary activities. When we're lonely in a "hot" way, we look for something to save us; we look for a way out. We get this queasy feeling that we call loneliness, and our minds just go wild trying to come up with companions to save us from despair. That's called unnecessary activity. It's a way of keeping ourselves busy so we don't have to feel any pain. It could take the form of obsessively daydreaming of true romance, or turning a tidbit of gossip into the six o'clock news, or even going off by ourselves into the wilderness. The point is that in all these activities, we are seeking companionship in our usual, habitual way, using our same old repetitive ways of distancing ourselves from the demon loneliness. Could we just settle down and have some — Pema Chodron

Has a girl ever faked an orgasm with you?" I blurt out. It's eight o'clock on Monday morning, and I nervously tap my fingers on the kitchen counter as I look at my roommate.

Dean, who was on his way to the fridge, stops in his tracks so abruptly that if he'd been on skates, I would be wiping ice shavings off my face right now.

"I'm sorry, didn't hear you. What was that? — Elle Kennedy

Eleven o'clock had come and gone. I had to find a way to bring this conversation to a successful conclusion and get out of there. But before I could say anything, she suddenly asked me to hold her.
'Why?' I asked, caught off guard.
'To charge my batteries,' she said.
'Charge your batteries?'
'My body has run out of electricity. I haven't been able to sleep for days now. The minute I get to sleep I wake up, and then I can't get back to sleep. I can't think. When I get like that, somebody has to charge my batteries. Otherwise, I can't go on living. It's true.'
I peered into her eyes, wondering if she was still drunk, but they were once again her usual cool, intelligent eyes. She was far from drunk. — Haruki Murakami

They also knew that there was a string of DNA at the end of each chromosome called a telomere, which shortened a tiny bit each time a cell divided, like time ticking off a clock. As normal cells go through life, their telomeres shorten with each division until they're almost gone. Then they stop dividing and begin to die. This process correlates with the age of a person: the older we are, the shorter our telomeres, and the fewer times our cells have left to divide before they die. By the early nineties, a scientist at Yale had used HeLa to discover that human cancer cells contain an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds their telomeres. The presence of telomerase meant cells could keep regenerating their telomeres indefinitely. This explained the mechanics of HeLa's immortality: telomerase constantly rewound the ticking clock at the end of Henrietta's chromosomes so they never grew old and never died. — Rebecca Skloot

Oh, and they said I have ADD, too." He lit a cigarette, his first of the day, and took a long, grateful drag. "But listen mate, I once sucked a geezer for twenty minutes to get him off. The clock was just over his shoulder and I timed it. Attention deficit?" He blew out a plume of smoke. "I don't think so. — S.A. Reid

I'd like to give every young teacher some good news. Teaching is a very easy job. Administrators will tell you what to do. You'll be given books and told chapters to assign the children. Veteran teachers will show you the correct way to fill out forms and have your classes line up.
And here's some more good news. If you do all of these things badly, they let you keep doing it. You can go home at three o'clock every day. You get about three months off a year. Teaching is a great gig.
However, if you care about what you're doing, it's one of the toughest jobs around. — Rafe Esquith

He grins sourly. "I only make big bets that involve lives and the future of humanity." His shoulders slump as though the invisible weight on them is too much. "Speaking of which, you handled yourself well out there. Better than anyone expected. We could really use someone like you. There are situations that a girl like you could handle better than a platoon of men." His grin turns boyish. "Assuming you don't clock an angel for pissing you off."
"That's a big assumption. — Susan Ee

Ben Roethlisberger is a proven winner in athletic competition. But the measure of a true leader is how they conduct themselves 24/7, not just during a winning touchdown drive or a goal-line stance. Leadership isn't something that gets switched off because the game clock expires. — Jackson Katz

The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year. The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases. The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information- ... That is closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

The thing is, being lonely is like walking in the cold without a coat. It's uncomfortable, but eventually you go numb. Once you get used to not being lonely, though, the shock of going back is like having your down comforter yanked off at six o'clock on a Minnesota December morning. — Maggie Hall

He went to his own dark house and lighted the lamps and set fire in the stove. The clock wound by Elizabeth still ticked, storing in its spring the pressure of her hand, and the wool socks she had hung to dry over the stove screen were still damp. These were vital parts of Elizabeth that were not dead yet. Joseph pondered slowly over it. Life cannot be cut off quickly. One cannot be dead until the things he changed are dead. His effect is the only evidence of his life. — John Steinbeck

My thoughts drift to Brittany. I've tried to forget Brittany will be going with someone else to the Halloween dance. I heard she was going with her old boyfriend. I try to push out of my mind the fact that another guy will have his hands on her.
Her date will kiss her tonight, I'm sure of it. Who wouldn't want to kiss those sweet, soft, frosted lips?
I'm going to work tonight until I have to leave for the deal. Because if I was home alone, I'd go nuts thinking about everything.
My grip on the riveter in my hand loosens and it drops smack in the middle of my forehead. I don't get pissed off at myself, I blame Brittany. And by eight o'clock I'm as angry as anything with my little chem partner, whether it's warranted or not. — Simone Elkeles

The very next day, we were told that Abigail had had a massive stroke. She was alive, but the woman we had known had vanished. She did not know where she was or who she was. The alarm clock had gone off. The very old languish and die. We know that, buy the very old know it far better than the rest of us. They live in a world of continual loss and this, as my mother had said, is bitter. [p. 172] — Siri Hustvedt

Dr. Norman Shealy found while researching magnesium oil that magnesium applied to the skin on a regular basis naturally enhances the level of a vitally important hormone, DHEA. DHEA is normally produced in the adrenal glands, but production slows down as we age. Apparently as magnesium is absorbed through the skin and the underlying fatty tissues of the body it sets off many chain reactions, one of which ends in the production of DHEA. Increasing DHEA levels by taking supplements of the hormone is recommended by some antiaging specialists, but others caution about side effects. To increase it naturally by improving your magnesium balance may be a safe way to turn back the clock. — Carolyn Dean

You're with me, Sadie. When you're off the clock, you're not my employee. You're my.. Air."
I frowned at him. "Your air?"
He grinned. "Well, girlfriend seems to be a shallow word for what I feel for you.. — Abbi Glines

I actually do mind having a photo taken because it's one o'clock in the morning and I'm off my face. — Benedict Cumberbatch

Well, I'd hardly finished the first verse," said the Hatter, "when the Queen bawled out 'He's murdering the time! Off with his head!'"
"How dreadfully savage!" exclaimed Alice.
"and ever since that," the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, "he wo'n't do a thing I ask! It's always six o'clock now. — Lewis Carroll

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell. The — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Every time you choose to do the easy thing, instead of the right thing, you are shaping your identity, becoming the type of person who does what's easy, rather than what's right. On the other hand, when you do choose to do the right thing and follow through with your commitments - especially when you don't feel like it - you are developing the extraordinary discipline (which most people never develop) necessary for creating extraordinary results in your life. As my good friend, Peter Voogd, often teaches his clients: "Discipline creates lifestyle." For example, when the alarm clock goes off, and we hit the snooze button (the easy thing), most people mistakenly assume that this action is only affecting that moment. The reality is that this type of action is — Hal Elrod

A heck of a lot more accountability comes from individuals or the church doing it than the government, that signs off on helping people at 5 o'clock, because it comes from the heart, not from a badge or a mandate. — Doug LaMalfa

Polly Jefferson rolled off her left arm, which had gone numb from the full weight of her body for the previous several hours that she had been asleep. She tapped her fingers on her leg, feeling the pins and needles, and looked at the clock, which blinked 6:30 in lurid red LCD. Instinctively she craned her head towards the other side of the bed, but she knew already what she would find there. The sheets were rumpled but empty and cold, and her husband's briefcase, which had been leaning against the dresser the night before, was gone. He had already left for London. — C.A. Gray

It was like a blackout in reverse. Since around nine o'clock, no lamps could be switched off, no electrical appliances powered down. If you tried to pull out the plug there was an alarming crackling sound and sparks flew between the outlet and the plug, preventing the circuit from being broken. — John Ajvide Lindqvist

When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes. Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms. There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging. — Alan Lightman

I hope to define my life, whatever is left, by migrations, south and north with the birds and far from the metallic fever of clocks, the self staring at the clock saying, "I must do this." I can't tell the time on the tongue of the river in the cool morning air, the smell of the ferment of greenery, the dust off the canyon's rock walls, the swallows swooping above the scent of raw water. — Jim Harrison

Huge clouds were already careering in the skies, and distant flashes announced a tempest. About ten o'clock, the storm burst forth; and Milady found some consolation in seeing Nature partake of the commotion within her. The thunder bellowed in the air like the angry passions in her soul; and it seemed to her as if the passing gusts disturbed her brow, as they did the trees of which they bent down the branches and sept off the leaves. She howled like the tempest, but her voice was unheard Amidst the vast voice of Nature, which also appeared to be herself groaning in despair. — Alexandre Dumas

Think about something else," Kaitlyn said. "Did you ever find a cow alarm clock around here?"
"No. A what?"
"An alarm clock shaped like a cow. It was Lewis's. It used to go off every morning, this sound like a cowbell and then a voice shouting 'Wake up! Don't sleep your life away!' And then it would moo."
Lydia giggled faintly. "I wish I'd seen that. It sounds-like Lewis."
"Actually, it sounded like a cow." Kaitlyn could hear Lydia snorting softly in the darkness for a while, then silence. She pulled the covers over her head and went to sleep. — L.J.Smith

I took ten days off and by 11 o'clock on the first morning I had drunk fourteen cups of coffee, read all the newspapers and the Guardian and then ... and then what?
By lunchtime I was so bored that I decided to hang a few pictures. So I found a hammer, and later a man came to replaster the bits of wall I had demolished. Then I tried to fix the electric gates, which work only when there's an omega in the month. So I went down the drive with a spanner, and later another man came to put them back together again.
I was just about to start on the Aga, which had broken down on Christmas Eve, as they do, when my wife took me on one side by my earlobe and explained that builders do not, on the whole, spend their spare time writing, so writers should not build on their days off. It's expensive and it can be dangerous, she said. — Jeremy Clarkson

When I stay with the couple who are my closest friends, I hear them laughing and talking in bed, and sometimes in the middle of the night one of them goes down and makes tea, and when the clock goes off in the morning, they start again, talking to each other. — Nuala O'Faolain

I'm not a T.G.I.F. guy. I get off a plane at 2 o'clock in the morning and I'm looking for my secretary because I want to know what's going on. — Vijay Mallya

I'd done some acting in high school. Then I went to Kenyon College and got thrown in jail and kicked off the football team. Since I was determined not to study very much, I majored in theater the last two years. Got my degree in speech; they didn't actually have a degree in theater. I graduated at two o'clock in the afternoon, and at three-thirty I was on the train for Williams Bay, Wisconsin, for summer stock, and then I did winter stock. — Paul Newman

With THC in your system, you don't dream. And you need to. Otherwise it is like losing one of your senses. Dreams are part of your wholeness ... when you're dreaming, you're not the one calling the shots. So it's a reprieve ... the dream world had rules in it. You couldn't read a clock in your dreams. It would not give you the time. If the lights were on in a room, you could not turn them off in a dream ... in indigenous tribes all over the world, the dream world was like church. [p. 247] — Anne Lamott

The clock strikes off the hollow half-hours of all the life that is left to you, one by one. — Emily Bronte

The song that was playing above us was You And Me by Lifehouse and he pressed his face into my hair and softly sang the words to me.
What day is it? And in what month?
This clock never seemed so alive
I can't keep up I can't back down
I'm losing so much time
'Cause it's you and me, and all of the people
with nothing to do, nothing to lose
And it's you and me, and all of the people
And I don't know why I can't keep my eyes off of you
I could have died ... or cried ... or sighed. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do more. — Shelly Crane

This morning I woke up before the alarm clock went off and the sky outside was a big red ocean. You're beautiful when you're sleeping so I spent an hour observing the way you breathe. Inhale, exhale, without a thought of tomorrow. The window was open and the air was so crisp and I couldn't imagine how to ever ask for more than this. — Charlotte Eriksson

I think when you're off the clock, you should be off the clock. — Jennifer Aniston

Most people forget that Danny Biasone was the Wilbur Wright of basketball. Because he invented the 24-second clock, the game took off. Yet he was a man who never played the game. — Dolph Schayes

If you want to write what the world is about, you have to write details ... real life is in the dishes. Real life is pushing strollers up the street, folding T-shirts, the alarm clock going off early and you dropping into bed exhausted every night. That's real life. — Anna Quindlen

It is largely dissynchronous timing standards that have kept human beings off-balance and alienated from the natural cycles of the Earth they inhabit. The worst culprit is the Gregorian calendar, and by extension the "12:60 frequency" that it fosters - together these have become, in essence, the inescapable time clock of globalist capitalism. — Jose Arguelles

Being a father, well, I don't know if this is a change, but it makes me want to get out of here faster. Get off the clock. Just 'cause the baby is my reason for living, my reason for coming to work. — Richard Dean Anderson

I wake up and tear drops, they fall down like rain. I put on that old song we danced to and then, I head off to my job cause not much has changed. Punch the clock, head for home, check the phone. Just in case. Go to bed, dream of you. That's what I am doing these days. — Rascal Flatts

Deadworld? Is that where you're from?" "No, dude. That's where you're from. It's where we are now. This place, it's a horror show. If the guy next to you decides to knock you out of this world forever, he can do it with just a piece of metal or, hell, even his bare hand. You blobs, you sit there, chillin' in this room and I can smell the rot of dead animals soaking in the acid of your guts. You suck the life from the innocent creatures of this world just so you can clock another day. You're machines that run on the terror and pain and mutilation of other lives. You'll scrape the world clean of every green and living thing until starvation goes one-eight-seven on every one of your sorry asses, your desperation to put off death leadin' to the ultimate death of everybody and everything. Dude, I can't believe you ain't all paralyzed by the pure, naked horror of this place. — David Wong

When I'm off the clock, I usually play video games - or do something nature-y so I can contribute to Mother Nature. — Harry Shum Jr.

This woman is Pocahontas. She is Athena and Hera. Lying in this messy, unmade bed, eyes closed, this is Juliet Capulet. Blanche DuBois. Scarlett O'Hara. With ministrations of lipstick and eyeliner I give birth to Ophelia. To Marie Antoinette. Over the next trip of the larger hand around the face of the bedside clock, I give form to Lucrezia Borgia. Taking shape at my fingertips, my touches of foundation and blush, here is Jocasta. Lying here, Lady Windermere. Opening her eyes, Cleopatra. Given flesh, a smile, swinging her sculpted legs off one side of the bed, this is Helen of Troy. Yawning and stretching, here is every beautiful woman across history. — Chuck Palahniuk

She serves me a piece of it a few minutes
out of the oven. A little steam rises
from the slits on top. Sugar and spice -
cinnamon - burned into the crust.
But she's wearing these dark glasses
in the kitchen at ten o'clock
in the morning - everything nice -
as she watches me break off
a piece, bring it to my mouth,
and blow on it. My daughter's kitchen,
in winter. I fork the pie in
and tell myself to stay out of it.
She says she loves him. No way
could it be worse. — Raymond Carver

Since the start of the Ashes I have had a hectic workload. I've played almost every game, but I'm thinking that after South Africa and the Bangladesh series I can clock off for two or three months. It's like Friday afternoon for a guy who goes to work all week. — Brett Lee

My name is Bear. I am a reluctant homosexual (or, at least, I resemble one). My boyfr - er, life partner (gag!), is apparently like a forty-year-old woman, and his biological clock is exploding all over the place, and we don't know how to turn off the alarm. We need a woman (ha!) to allow us to put our sperm into her so that we can create the miracle that is life! You, as the surrogate, must not be crazy!!!!! — T.J. Klune

But the colonel said and did nothing as the seconds splintered off the clock and fell like debris on the floor. — Jonathan Maberry

As soon as I decided I'd have to dig down still deeper to uncover the root of my listless withdrawal from life, I became aware of some interference from the past distracting and confusing my thoughts, causing me a sensation that was at the same time oppressive, expectant and empty. In these somewhat contradictory feelings, I came to recognize my childish sense of having run down like a clock that needed someone to wind it before it could go again; and saw that I was now no less helpless than in those far-off days when I waited for somebody to take me by the hand and tell me what to do. On my own initiative I could do nothing, take no responsibility, make no decisions only watch my existence unroll. — Anna Kavan

The crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock. — Margaret Halsey

Here's the thing. I hate kids. Always have.
I mean, I know the job of the race, biologically speaking, is to achieve immortality through reproduction, but the idea of getting impregnated and blowing up like a balloon as I serve as a carrier and service unit for this other person who will eventually burst out of me in the most terrifying way imaginable, then carry on using me one way or another for the rest of my life, is right up there with throwing myself off the top of a twenty-story building. If I have a biological clock, it is digital and does not tick. — Isobelle Carmody