Clockwork Quotes

“Whither thou goest, I will go;
Where thou diest, will I die
And there will I be buried:
The Angel do so to me, and more also,
If aught but death part thee and me.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“Henry," said Charlotte, who appeared to have recovered from her shock, "if you set yourself on fire deliberately, I will institute divorce proceedings. Now sit down and eat your supper. And say hello to our guest.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“He banged on the side of the carriage. "Thomas! We must away at once to the nearest brothel. I seek scandal and low companionship.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“Where do I come into all of this? Am I just some animal or dog?' And that started them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me. So I creeched louder still, creeching: 'Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“A clockwork heart can't replace the real thing.”
― Dru Pagliassotti, Clockwork Heart

“For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn't, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story.”
― Phillip Pullman

“Perhaps you are a clockwork girl. Perhaps Mortmain’s warlock father built you, and now Mortmain seeks the secret of how to create such a perfect facsimile of life when all he can build are hideous monstrosities. Perhaps all that beats beneath your chest is a heart made of metal.’
Tessa drew in a breath, feeling momentarily dizzy. His soft voice was so convincing, and yet--’No,’ she said sharply. ‘You forget, I remember my childhood. Mechanical creatures do not change or grow. Nor would that explain my ability.’
‘I know,’ said Will with a grin that flashed white in the darkness. ‘I only wanted to see if I could convince you.’
Tessa looked at him steadily. ‘I am not the one who has no heart.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“You can hear it in the midst of the night
While your gaze roams the vast plains on the ceiling”
― Erna Grcic, Beneath the Surface

“Mere springs and coils produced the inward movements of our clockwork man. He might be termed a Puritan. One essential dislike, formidable in its simplicity, pervaded his dull soul: he disliked injustice and deception. He disliked their union—they were always together—with a wooden passion that neither had, nor needed, words to express itself. Such a dislike should have deserved praise had it not been a by-product of the man’s hopeless stupidity. He called unjust and deceitful everything that surpassed his understanding. He worshiped general ideas and did so with pedantic aplomb. The generality was godly, the specific diabolical. If one person was poor and the other wealthy it did not matter what precisely had ruined one or made the other rich: the difference itself was unfair, and the poor man who did not denounce it was as wicked as the rich one who ignored it. People who knew too much, scientists, writers, mathematicians, crystalographers and so forth, were no better than kings or priests: they all held an unfair share of power of which others were cheated. A plain decent fellow should constantly be on the watch tor some piece of clever knavery on the part of nature and neighbor.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“Fritz had to stop himself from interrupting when Karl spoke about the difficulty of working. Stories are just as hard as clocks to put together, and they can go wrong just as easily--as we shall soon see with Fritz's own story in a page or two. Still, Fritz was an optimist, and Karl was a pessimist, and that makes all the difference in the world.”
― Philip Pullman, Clockwork

“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

“It's almost as if we're made of the same messed-up clockwork, ticking and ticking out of balance”
― Adam Silvera, History Is All You Left Me

“It’s so overwhelming when you notice how the clock ticks; so many tiny pieces holding each other together just so it keeps going. We are like clocks, too! Always ticking to the tocks. When the pieces of our soul are torn away or broken – we can’t be sent to the mending shop, however. So how do we get better? Workable? Thoughts can be tiring, at times. Or maybe it’s the same time – who knows? The clock is broken. Meh.”
― Sijdah Hussain, Red Sugar, No More

“You don't win races by wishing, you win them by running faster than everyone else. And to do that you have to train hard and strive your utmost, and sometimes even that isn't enough, because another runner just might be more talented than you are. Here's the truth: if you want something, you can have it, but only if you want everything that goes with it, including all the hard work and the despair, and only if you're willing to risk failure. (That's the problem with Karl: he was afraid of failing, so he never really tried.)”
― Phillip Pullman

“If the world is a Watch, as the Deists claim, then it is evidently two minutes behind.
—James Beresford, The Miseries of Human Life”
― Tad Tuleja, The Catalog of Lost Books: An Annotated and Seriously Addled Collection of Great Books that Should Have Been Written but Never Were

“That August, Elodie Selkirk became the latest lady in Paris to order a coin-operated boy.”
― Kirsty Logan, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales

“The Clockwork Commune were made of many things, and some of them were steamtruck wheels and landship tracks. They salvaged speed, and used it to help them salvage everything else.”
― Dean F. Wilson, Worldwaker

“You’re not wearing your normal dandy attire, but you still cut a figure,” Theo said begrudgingly. “If you think you can approach as a prospective buyer, I’ll sneak around back and try to filch the clockwork maid.”

“What is this planning balderdash?” he said, a smile playing on his face. “I thought, with you involved, we’d be marching in and drawing iron.”
― Katherine McIntyre, Of Tinkers and Technomancers