“She didn't want to be one of those old ladies obsessed with death, hearing it in every tick of the clock and creak of the floorboards, as if it were prowling around the house like a burglar”

“There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals... We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as "tick-tock, tick-tock" - even though it is actually "tick tick, tick tick.”

“Just like the beating of the heart of a man...so is the ticking of a clock...and just like the ticking of a clock...so is the ticking of a bomb.”

“Someday all the wilds will be razed, and we will be left with a concrete landscape, a land of pretty houses and trim gardens and planned parks and forests, and a world that works as smoothly as a clock, neatly wound: a world of metal and gears, and people going tick-tick-tick to their deaths.”

“After a while I get the feeling that Mum and Brian aren’t home. Kane either. It’s because the house is making so much noise; ticking and creaking as it stretches in the sun. Acting like a house does when nobody’s around to see it. It must have forgotten about me.”

“The trouble with friends was that you couldn’t get rid of them. There was no way to take back a friendship in the wake of betrayal or disappointment. The friendship, and everything that went with it, stayed. It just became unreliable, like an abandoned house; you still knew where all the rooms were, and which stairs creaked underfoot, but you had to check every floorboard for rot before trusting your weight to it.”