“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.”

“The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only the electronic clocks but the wind-up kind too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again.There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling I had to believe whatever clocks said -and calendars.”

“O how all things are far removed and long have passed away. I do believe the star, whose light my face reflects, is dead and has been so for many thousand years. I had a vision of a passing boat and heard some voices saying disquieting things. I heard a clock strike in some distant house... but in which house?... I long to quiet my anxious heart and stand beneath the sky's immensity. I long to pray... And one of all the stars must still exist. I do believe that I would know which one alone endured, and which like a white city stands at the ray's end shining in the heavens. ”

“It would be so good to settle down and become part of somewhere again, instead of constantly passing through”

“Of course I knew what time you would get here, girl. Just as I know what time Goodfellow will knock over my nineteenth-century French mantle clock.” Puck jerked up at this, bumping a table and sending a clock crashing to the floor. “To the second,” the Clockmaker sighed, closing his eyes.”

“I looked at the clock with the faint unconscious hope common to all mothers that time will somehow have passed magically away and the next time you look it will be bedtime.”