“The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.”

“This is Holy Wood. To pass the time quickly, you just film the clock hands moving fast...”

“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.”

“I can see we're going to get along like a house on fire," said Miss Tick. "There may be no survivors.”

“Don't wish, Miss Tick had said. Do things.”

“He had never been interested in stories at any age, and had never quite understood the basic concept. He'd never read a work of fiction all the way through. He did remember, as a small boy, being really annoyed at the depiction of Hickory Dickory Dock in a rag book of nursery rhymes because the clock in the drawing was completely wrong for the period.”

“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.”