Tock Quotes

Killing time isn't as difficult as it sounds.
I can shoot a hundred numbers through the chest and watch them bleed decimal points in the palm of my hand. I can rip the numbers off a clock and watch the hour hand tick tick tick its final tock just before I fall asleep. I can suffocate seconds just by holding my breath. I've been murdering minutes for hours and no one seems to mind. ~ Tahereh Mafi

But there's so much to learn," he said, with a thoughtful frown.
"Yes, that's true," admitted Rhyme; "but it's not just learning things that's important. It's learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things at all that matters."
"That's just what I mean," explained Milo as Tock and the exhausted bug drifted quietly off to sleep. "Many of the things I'm supposed to know seem so useless that I can't see the purpose in learning them at all."
"You may not see it now," said the Princess of Pure Reason, looking knowingly at Milo's puzzled face, "but whatever we learn has a purpose and whatever we do affects everything and everyone else, if even in the tiniest way. ~ Norton Juster

Each passing moment, every breath I took, I was worried I'd hear a tick, but not live long enough to hear its tock. ~ Cameron Jace

Clocks were invented to warn us. Tick (time is passing). Tock (time has passed). ~ Kamand Kojouri

We may be just two different clocks, that do not tock in unison. ~ Lang Leav

Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man and Dirk and Duck and Cherokee and Witch Baby and Slinkster Dog and Go-Go Girl and the puppies Pee Wee, Wee Wee, Teenie Wee, Tiki Tee, and Tee Pee were driving down Hollywood Boulevard on their way to the Tick Tock Tea Room for turkey platters. ~ Francesca Lia Block

And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes goes goes goes goes tick tock tick tock tick tock and one day we no longer let time serve us, we serve time and we are slaves of the schedule, worshipers of the sun's passing, bound into a life predicated on restrictions because the system will not function if we don't keep the schedule tight. ~ Harlan Ellison

What Kant took to be the necessary schemata of reality,' says a modern Freudian, 'are really only the necessary schemata of repression.' And an experimental psychologist adds that 'a sense of time can only exist where there is submission to reality.' To see everything as out of mere succession is to behave like a man drugged or insane. Literature and history, as we know them, are not like that; they must submit, be repressed. It is characteristic of the stage we are now at, I think, that the question of how far this submission ought to go--or, to put it the other way, how far one may cultivate fictional patterns or paradigms--is one which is debated, under various forms, by existentialist philosophers, by novelists and anti-novelists, by all who condemn the myths of historiography. It is a debate of fundamental interest, I think, and I shall discuss it in my fifth talk.

Certainly, it seems, there must, even when we have achieved a modern degree of clerical scepticism, be some submission to the fictive patterns. For one thing, a systematic submission of this kind is almost another way of describing what we call 'form.' 'An inter-connexion of parts all mutually implied'; a duration (rather than a space) organizing the moment in terms of the end, giving meaning to the interval between tick and tock because we humanly do not want it to be an indeterminate interval between the tick of birth and the tock of death. That is a way of speaking in temporal terms of literary f ~ Frank Kermode

When Suzie introduced Helen, she told the audience that one of the best things about books is that they are an interactive art form: that while the author may describe in some detail how a character looks, it is the reader's imagination that completes the image, making it his or her own. "That's why we so often don't like movies made from books, right?" Suzie said. "We don't like someone else's interpretation of what we see so clearly." She talked, too, about how books educate and inspire, and how they soothe the soul-"like comfort food without the calories," she said. She talked about the tactile joys of reading, the feel of a page beneath one's fingers; the elegance of typeface on a page. She talked about how people complain that they don't have time to read, and reminded them that if they gave up half an hour of television a day in favor of reading, they could finish twenty-five books a year. "Books don't take time away from us," she said. "They give it back. In this age of abstraction, of multitasking, of speed for speed's sake, they reintroduce us to the elegance-and the relief!-of real, tick-tock time. ~ Elizabeth Berg

Time crawls in the silence. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tock. Tock. Tock. ~ Emily McKay

Here was a boy who was now ashamed of being a boy. He had made a friend and the friend had invited him to stay over, as friends sometimes do. Benny had undoubtedly promised that Jake could help him feed the animals, and perhaps shoot his bow (or his bah, if it shot bolts instead of arrows). There would be places Benny would want to share,secret places he might have gone to with his twin in other times. A platform in a tree, mayhap, or a fishpond in the reeds special to him, or a stretch of riverbank where pirates of eld were reputed to have buried gold and jewels. Such places as boys go. But a large part of Jake Chambers was now ashamed to want to do such things. This was the part that had been despoiled by the doorkeeper in Dutch Hill, by Gasher, by the Tick-Tock Man. And by Roland himself, of course.Were he to say no to Jake's request now, the boy would very likely never ask again. And never resent him for it, which was even worse. Were he to say yes in the wrong way - with even the slightest trace of indulgence in his voice, for instance - the boy would change his mind. ~ Stephen King

I never knew words could be so confusing," Milo said to Tock as he bent down to scratch the dog's ear.
"Only when you use a lot to say a little," answered Tock.
Milo thought this was quite the wisest thing he'd heard all day. ~ Norton Juster

I tapped the clock drawn in black eyliner around my felt eye. "Tick tock, Rabbit. Always and forever, tick tock. ~ Tillie Cole

Dreams do not exist within the realm of hours or minutes or any measure of the day. They live between the tick and the tock. Before the toiling of the bell, past the dawn, and beyond the velvet night. ~ William Joyce

Until now, I've been writing about "now" as if it were literally an instant of time, but of course human faculties are not infinitely precise. It is simplistic to suppose that physical events and mental events march along exactly in step, with the stream of "actual moments" in the outside world and the stream of conscious awareness of them perfectly synchronized. The cinema industry depends on the phenomenon that what seems to us a movie is really a succession of still pictures, running at twenty-five [sic] frames per second. We don't notice the joins. Evidently the "now" of our conscious awareness stretches over at least 1/25 of a second.

In fact, psychologists are convinced it can last a lot longer than that. Take he familiar "tick-tock" of the clock. Well, the clock doesn't go "tick-tock" at all; it goes "tick-tick," every tick producing the same sound. It's just that our consciousness runs two successive ticks into a singe "tick-tock" experience - but only if the duration between ticks is less than about three seconds. A really bug pendulum clock just goes "tock . . . tock . . . tock," whereas a bedside clock chatters away: "ticktockticktock..." Two to three seconds seems to be the duration over which our minds integrate sense data into a unitary experience, a fact reflected in the structure of human music and poetry. ~ Paul Davies

There was this cheap motel on the outskirts of town called the Tick-Tock Inn, with green-and-yellow vinyl curtains and beds that smelled like mothballs and ass. ~ Maris Black

She was a spiky teenager rebelling against the soul-suck mirror reflected back at her in her mother's blank stare, her question mark of a spine. Determined to beat the odds, she completed high school with distinction. But there was a caveat. Beydan was allowed to roam and educate herself – up to a point. On her eighteenth birthday her Father sat her down and held out his Rolexed wrist. Studded with crystals and flecks of diamond, the watch dazzled in the light. All Beydan could hear, however, was tick-tock-tick-tick-tick-tick - time to neatly fold all her hard work, to parcel up her progress, send it to the attic in her subconscious and let dust gather on her dreams. There was a lump in her throat and a stopwatch in her womb. ~ Diriye Osman

You never have a friend all figured out. Just when you think you know what makes them tick, they tock. ~ Robert Breault

Tick tock, this is a clock. ~ Suzanne Collins

Tick, tock," whispers Wiress. I guide her in front of me and get her to lie down, stroking her arm to soothe her. She drifts off, stirring restlessly, occasionally sighing out her phrase. "Tick, tock." "Tick, tock," I agree softly. "It's time for bed. Tick, tock. Go to sleep. ~ Suzanne Collins

Its time I hear the clock
Tick tock tick tock
Go and killl the bad inner being
In you soul it has neva been..!! ~ B. Bhardwaz

And I thought, I am in love. For the first time I am in love. And loved. Someone loves me. And I love them. And within me things clicked and whirled like the insides of some gigantic clock, cog against wheel, spring against spiral, tick against tock, and I knew that nothing would ever be the same again. I had shown someone what I really was. I had shown someone my truth, my secret. Out there, beyond the walls of the Castle, there was a boy who had seen inside my chrysalis. And I would never be safe again. ~ Philip Ridley

What, then, can Shakespearean tragedy, on this brief view, tell us about human time in an eternal world? It offers imagery of crisis, of futures equivocally offered, by prediction and by action, as actualities; as a confrontation of human time with other orders, and the disastrous attempt to impose limited designs upon the time of the world. What emerges from Hamlet is--after much futile, illusory action--the need of patience and readiness. The 'bloody period' of Othello is the end of a life ruined by unseasonable curiosity. The millennial ending of Macbeth, the broken apocalypse of Lear, are false endings, human periods in an eternal world. They are researches into death in an age too late for apocalypse, too critical for prophecy; an age more aware that its fictions are themselves models of the human design on the world. But it was still an age which felt the human need for ends consonant with the past, the kind of end Othello tries to achieve by his final speech; complete, concordant. As usual, Shakespeare allows him his tock; but he will not pretend that the clock does not go forward. The human perpetuity which Spenser set against our imagery of the end is represented here also by the kingly announcements of Malcolm, the election of Fortinbras, the bleak resolution of Edgar.

In apocalypse there are two orders of time, and the earthly runs to a stop; the cry of woe to the inhabitants of the earth means the end of their time; henceforth 'time shall be no more.' I ~ Frank Kermode

'After what happened to the Toyota, Seven says you aren't allowed to drive a vehicle again worth more than fifteen grand.'
'What!' the Clock Twins said, sounding shocked.
'Billy! How are we supposed to pick up chicks in a crapmobile?' Tock groaned. ~ T.J. Klune

I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops. I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me. ~ Ben Hecht

There are 86,400 seconds in a day. And in any ONE of them you can decide to CHANGE your life. Tick tock tick tock. ~ Sven Paardekooper

We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return. ~ Julian Barnes

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

In a clock the complex action of countless different wheels works its way out in the even, leisurely movement of hands measuring time; in a similar way the complex action of humanity in those 160,000 Russians and Frenchmen – all their passions, longings, regrets, humiliation and suffering, their rushes of pride, fear and enthusiasm – only worked its way out in defeat at the battle of Austerlitz, known as the battle of the three Emperors, the slow tick-tock of the age-old hands on the clock face of human history. ~ Leo Tolstoy

It had a very long pendulum, and the pendulum swung with a slow tick-tock that set his teeth on edge, because it was the the kind of delibrate, annoying ticking that wanted to make it abundantly clear that every tick and every tock was stripping another second off your life. ~ Terry Pratchett

The fancy things I like are sheets. Pots and pans. And the things I really like aren't fancy at all: old aprons and hankies. Butter wrappers from one pound blocks. Peony bushes, hardback books of poetry. And I like things less than that; the sticky remains at the bottom of the apple crisp dish. The way cats sometimes run sideways. The presence of a rainbow in a puddle of oil. Mayonaise jars. Pussy willows. Wash on a line. The tick-tock of clocks, the blue of the neon sign at the local movie house. The fact that there is a local movie house. ~ Elizabeth Berg

The zest for life of those unusual men and women who make a great zealous success of living is due more often in good part to the craftiness and pertinacity with which they manage to overlook the misery of others. You can watch them watch life beat the stuffing out of the faces of their friends and acquaintances, although they themselves seem to outwit the dense delays of social custom, the tedious tick-tock of bureaucratic obfuscation, accepting loss and age and change and disappointment without suffering punctures in their stomach lining. ~ Edward Hoagland

Have fun with that. I know I will. You've got five minutes before I'm on your clock. Tick. Tock." And ~ K. Bromberg

So, when kiss Spring comes
we'll kiss each kiss other on kiss the kiss
lips because tic clocks tock don't make
a toctic difference
to kisskiss you and to
kiss me. ~ E. E. Cummings

Someone very clever - certainly someone much cleverer than whoever had trained that imp - must have made the clock for the Partrician's waiting room. It went tick-tock like any other clock. But somehow, and against all usual horological practice, the tick and the tock were irregular. Tick tock tick ... and then the merest fraction of a second longer before ... tock tick tock ... and then a tick a fraction of a second earlier than the mind's ear was now prepared for. The effect was enough, after ten minutes, to reduce the thinking processes of even the best-prepared to a sort of porridge. The Patrician must have paid the clockmaker quite highly. ~ Terry Pratchett

Tick Tock Tick Tock...The clock strikes two ... still haven't got a clue. ~ Knisztina

Tick tock? I didn't care how long he thought it was taking me to get to the beach, I was not crashing my new car by rushing. ~ Emma Doherty

His presence makes me feel thin. Not model slender. But worn, like an old cotton housedress. Thin like a specimen pressed between two plates of glass. Like a bug squashed beneath the marching boot of a soldier.
Thin and worn and silence like I've never known.
This is how I know he is not a Tick.
They are as pitiable as they are inhuman. They are fear personified. Their emotions and minds given over to rage and hunger. They are all noise. He is none.
If he is not a Tick, does that make him a Tock? ~ Emily McKay

...he raised the watch to his ear. Tapped on the metal. And with malice in his heart and darkness in his veins, smiled and said, "Tick tock. ~ Tillie Cole

Isn't this everyone's Point of View?" asked Tock, looking around curiously.
"Of course not," replied Alec, sitting himself down on nothing. "It's only mine, and you certainly can't always look at things from someone else's Point of View. For instance, from here that looks like a bucket of water," he said, pointing to a bucket of water; "but from an ant's point of view it's a vast ocean, from an elephant's just a cool drink, and to a fish, of course, it's home. So, you see, the way you see things depends a great deal on where you look at them from. ~ Norton Juster

Having poured my drink, I may not live to taste it, or that it may pass a live man's tongue to burn a dead man's belly; that having slumbered, I may never wake, or having waked, may never living sleep. Having heard tick, will I hear tock? Having served, will I volley? Having sugared will I cream? Having eithered, will I or? Itching, will I scratch? Hemming, will I haw? ~ John Barth

Tick Tock, The sun fell down; Ding Dong the moon took a peek, Ring Ding, It's Harmonizing my Insanity ~ Whitney Smith

Time
tick tock
says the clock
whirrling by
never shy
quietly pass
layer upon grass
until time has gone.
than you die. ~ Kayla Dunn

Of course, you don't have to have a degree to be rich. You just have to have ideas. Maybe having a degree sets you back, for it stuffs you into tick-tock [the daily grind of work], and perhaps that stifles your creative mind. But the fact is that many millionaires have few educational qualifications of any kind at all. However, they still have knowledge. The difference is, they have knowledge they can sell, and others have the "common knowledge" of tick-tock, which isn't worth as much, if anything at all. ~ Stuart Wilde

Looking down at Dolly, I took my watch from my pocket, raised it to my ear and announced, "Tick tock. ~ Tillie Cole

Back home, we can't kill them fast enough," he says. "Even Grahamites offer blue bills for their skins. Probably the only thing they've ever done that I agreed with."

"Mmm, yes." Emiko's brow wrinkles thoughtfully. "They are too much improved for this world, I think. A natural bird has so little chance, now." She smiles slightly. "Just think if they had made New People first."

Is it mischief in her eyes? Or melancholy?

"What do you think would have happened?" Anderson asks.

Emiko doesn't meet his gaze, looks out instead at the circling cats amongst the diners. "Generippers learned too much from cheshires."

She doesn't say anything else, but Anderson can guess what's in her mind. If her kind had come first, before the generippers knew better, she would not have been made sterile. She would not have the signature tick-tock motions that make her so physically obvious. She might have even been designed as well as the military windups now operating in Vietnam - deadly and fearless. Without the lesson of the cheshires, Emiko might have had the opportunity to supplant the human species entirely with her own improved version. Instead, she is a genetic dead end. Doomed to a single life cycle, just like SoyPRO and TotalNutrient Wheat.

Another shadow cat bolts across the street, shimmering and shading through darkness. A high-tech homage to Lewis Carroll, a few dirigible and clipper ship rides, and suddenly entire classes ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

Lord Cut-Glass, in his kitchen full of time, squats down alone to a dogdish, marked Fido, of peppery fish-scraps and listens to the voices of his sixty-six clocks, one for each year of his loony age, and watches, with love, their black-and-white moony loudlipped faces tocking the earth away: slow clocks, quick clocks, pendulumed heart-knocks, china, alarm, grandfather, cuckoo; clocks shaped like Noah's whirring Ark, clocks that bicker in marble ships, clocks in the wombs of glass women, hourglass chimers, tu-wit-tuwoo clocks, clocks that pluck tunes, Vesuvius clocks all black bells and lava, Niagara clocks that cataract their ticks, old time weeping clocks with ebony beards, clocks with no hands for ever drumming out time
without ever knowing what time it is. His sixty-six singers are all set at different hours. Lord Cut-Glass lives in a house and a life at siege. Any minute or dark day now, the unknown enemy will loot and savage downhill, but they will not catch him napping. Sixty-six different times in his fish-slimy kitchen ping, strike, tick, chime, and tock. ~ Dylan Thomas

The moon shone in the rocking horsr's eye, and in the mouse's eye, too, when Tolly fetched it out from under his pillow to see. The clock went tick-tock, and in the stillness he heard little bare feet running across the floor, then laughter and whispering, and a sound like the pages of a big book being turned over. ~ L.M. Boston

Johanna, could you really hear him screaming?" "That was part of it," she says. "Like the jabber jays in the arena. Only it was real. And it didn't stop after an hour. Tick tock. ~ Suzanne Collins

By contrast Hobie lived and wafted like some great sea mammal in his own mild atmosphere, the dark brown of tea stains and tobacco, where every clock in the house said something different and time didn't actually correspond to the standard measure but instead meandered along at its own sedate tick-tock, obeying the pace of his antique-crowded backwater, far from the factory-built, epoxy-glued version of the world. ~ Donna Tartt

. "You can't be here."

"Can't, shouldn't, wouldn't, won't," she whispered. "No one saw me go. No one thinks to look for someone who's always there. They are all looking for you."

"How did you find us?"

"You tick, I tock," she said, her voice so soft that only his ears could pick it up. "I would hear you anywhere." ~ Victoria Schwab

Billy leaned forward. 'What's he like?' he whispered conspiratorially.
'Who?' Tock asked, looking confused.
'Felix. The Split One. I heard he came in this afternoon shooting fire and wind from his hands and told the Council to shove it.'
'Uh, not quite,' Tick said. 'He kind of waved to everyone and went upstairs.' ~ T.J. Klune

Tick. Tick. Tick.
This is the sound of your life running out. ~ Anonymous

At some very low level, we all share certain fictions about time, and they testify to the continuity of what is called human nature, however conscious some, as against others, may become of the fictive quality of these fictions.

It seems to follow that we shall learn more concerning the sense-making paradigms, relative to time, from experimental psychologists than from scientists or philosophers, and more from St. Augustine than from Kant or Einstein because St. Augustine studies time as the soul's necessary self-extension before and after the critical moment upon which he reflects. We shall learn more from Piaget, from studies of such disorders as déjà vu, eidetic imagery, the Korsakoff syndrome, than from the learned investigators of time's arrow, or, on the other hand, from the mythic archetypes.

Let us take a very simple example, the ticking of a clock. We ask what it says: and we agree that it says tick-tock. By this fiction we humanize it, make it talk our language. Of course, it is we who provide the fictional difference between the two sounds; tick is our word for a physical beginning, tock our word for an end. We say they differ. What enables them to be different is a special kind of middle. We can perceive a duration only when it is organized. It can be shown by experiment that subjects who listen to rhythmic structures such as tick-tock, repeated identically, 'can reproduce the intervals within the structure accurately, but they cannot grasp s ~ Frank Kermode

Hell was full of clocks, he was sure of it. There was no torment, after all, that could not be exacerbated by a contemplation of time passing. The large case clock at the end of the corridor had a particularly penetrating tick-tock, audiable above and through all the noises of the house. It seemed to Lord John Grey to echo his own heartbeats, each one a step on the road towards death. ~ Diana Gabaldon

Tick-tock, tick-tock, little wolves. Do you feel time slipping away from you? Do you feel the urgency to pursue me, the one who plans your destruction? I am coming, little wolves. Tick-tock, tick-tock; I am coming for you. And one by one you will fall. One by one the wolves will be silenced." - Desmona ~ Quinn Loftis

Oh dear, all those words again," thought Milo as he climbed into the wagon with Tock and the cabinet members. "How are you going to make it move? It doesn't have a
" "Be very quiet," advised the duke, "for it goes without saying. ~ Norton Juster

Yeah, we know. Tick, tock. Nuts is in shock, ~ Suzanne Collins

Understanding what makes you 'tick' isn't half as much fun as finding out what makes you 'tock'! ~ Anthony T. Hincks

...judgement had no place here. Evil was not in play, just life pulsing on, even at the expense of some of the participants. Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in different light. Nothing seemed too indecorous as long as the tick & the tock of life carried on. She knew this was not a dark side to Nature, just inventive ways to endure against all odds. ~ Delia Owens

Time is drowning,
Hearts are burning,
Heads are rolling,
Nothing can save you now,
Tick tock, tick tock;

Creatures talking,
Weak are rising,
White Queen's nearing,
Nothing can save you now,
Tick tock, tick tock;

Cards are bleeding,
Crowns are sweating,
Tea is spilling,
Nothing can save you now,
Tick tock, tick tock;

Red Queen, here's your warning,
Wonderland's raging,
Alice is coming,
Highness, time is drowning,
And nothing can save you now,
Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock… ~ Emory R. Frie

I wouldn't eat too many of those [half-baked ideas] if I were you. They may look good, but you can get terribly sick of them."
-Tock ~ Norton Juster

Get rid of the dog! Tick Tock! ~ Nishta Kochar

How can you see something that isn't there?" yawned the Humbug, who wasn't fully awake yet.
"Sometimes, it's much simpler than seeing things that are,"he said. "For instance, if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones."
"Then where is Reality?" barked Tock.
"Right here,"cried Alec, waving his arms. ~ Norton Juster