"Clockwork" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... knew as much as some Cits and he acted just like them about the glorious day. Exactly forty-eight hours before each Fourth of July, the dog left our house on a run and hid himself in the Bronx woods. The day after the Fourth he turned up at home as regular as clockwork. He must have known what a dog is up against on the Fourth. Anyhow, he kept out of the way. The name-parted-in-the-middle aristocrats act in just the same way. They don't want to be annoyed with firecrackers ...
— Plunkitt of Tammany Hall • George Washington Plunkitt
... and, springing from her bed somewhat guiltily, ran to the window. What was her astonishment to see smoke coming out of the cookhouse chimney, Talolo at the door, and Iopu, the yard man, coming up with a pail of water—all the business of the place, in fact, going on like clockwork, just as though they had never been absent for a day! Running into her mother's room, she found her sitting up in bed just finishing her breakfast, which had been brought up on a tray by Sosimo. The news had gone forth the night before that they had returned, ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... brought against the institution. Here life for the inmates is made too easy, and little can be known by them of the actual struggles of the world. The life is machine-like, and all is routine clockwork. By the discipline, which is necessary, much of the spontaneity of growing children is destroyed, and the surroundings are pervaded with the spirit of uniformity, "solidarity" and "dead levelism." On the other hand, the children fail to learn many important lessons ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... frequented at the side of the mead; or, if already on the spot, hardily maintained their standing in the water as the pair walked by, watching them by moving their heads round in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel, like the turn of puppets by clockwork. ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... of the nineteenth century is a high cylinder of masonry, surmounted by scientifically constructed machinery for throwing light. The Caskets lighthouse in particular is a triple white tower, bearing three light-rooms. These three chambers revolve on clockwork wheels, with such precision that the man on watch who sees them from sea can invariably take ten steps during their irradiation, and twenty-five during their eclipse. Everything is based on the focal plan, and on the rotation of the octagon drum, formed of eight wide simple lenses in range, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... when not actually engaged in using her trowel, Miss Mullett stood with arms held out in scarecrow style so as not to contaminate her gown with garden mold, and presented a strange and unusual appearance. Every afternoon, as regular as clockwork, the Doctor came down the street and through the gate to lavish advice, commendation, and appropriate quotations from his beloved poets. At five Zephania appeared with the tea things and the partie carree gathered in the parlor and brought ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... keeper's dwelling had three rooms and was solidly built. The tower was thirty feet high. The lantern held a revolving light, with a four-wick Fresnel lamp, burning sperm oil. There was one of Stevenson's new cages of dioptric prisms around the flame, and once every minute it was turned by clockwork, flashing a broad belt of radiance fifteen miles across the sea. All night long that big bright eye was opening and shutting. "BAGUETTE!" said Thibault, "it winks like a ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... these Germans, in their stage management. Of course this was precisely the thing that they desired that he should feel. They had sent their shells at the right moment, the whole performance had gone off like clockwork. Those poor blackened masses of humanity in the house below were the cost that was represented in the performance. And since there is much still left to burn in Verdun, the Germans may repeat this thing ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... she heard Travers say in her ear. "Things went just like clockwork. Five minutes' conversation got the whole clubhouse out of him, and what you managed in your quarter of an hour, goodness knows. You are a clever woman ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... have a new departure. Gill at the Cape, having the comet 1882.ii. all to himself in those latitudes, wished his friends in Europe to see it, and employed a local photographer to strap his camera to the observatory equatoreal, driven by clockwork, and adjusted on the comet by the eye. The result with half-an-hour's exposure was good, so he tried three hours. The result was such a display of sharp star images that he resolved on the Cape Photographic ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... mighty Emperor of Greece and the chivalrous Knight of Paris had taken place earlier; for reflection on what had passed, had convinced the Emperor that the Franks were not a people to be imposed upon by pieces of clockwork, and similar trifles, and that what they did not understand, was sure, instead of procuring their awe or admiration, to excite their anger and defiance. Nor had it altogether escaped Count Robert, that the manners of the Eastern people were upon a different scale from those to which he ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Bennett's city clock in Cheapside. The automatic movements of these last-named figures would have struck the originators of the Varallo chapels with envy. They aimed at realism so closely that they would assuredly have had recourse to clockwork in some one or two of their chapels; I cannot doubt, for example, that they would have eagerly welcomed the idea of making the cock crow to Peter by a cuckoo-clock arrangement, if it had been presented to them. This opens ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... musings did not permit her to listen very closely to the remarks that fell one by one from Poiret's lips like water dripping from a leaky tap. When once this elderly babbler began to talk, he would go on like clockwork unless Mlle. Michonneau stopped him. He started on some subject or other, and wandered on through parenthesis after parenthesis, till he came to regions as remote as possible from his premises without coming to ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... between two piles of cushions, motionless, so that you could see her from a distance right in the background, looking like an idol, beneath the great fan which her negro waved regularly like a piece of clockwork. These foreign women ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... arms for a day or so, and then ignored for a week. His internal economy was never poisoned or upset by means of absurd gifts of sweetmeats. His meals reached him with the unfailing regularity of clockwork, and were so carefully designed that, whilst his growth never was retarded for lack of frequent nutriment, the finish of a meal always left him with some little appetite. And he never saw food save ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... never had enough fireworks in his life might be given a job in the German trenches, with the privilege of firing flares till he fell asleep from exhaustion. All night they were going, with the regularity of clockwork. The only ones sent up from our side that night were shot in order that I might get a better view of ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... put 'em on the green paper work, because it's got arsenic in it, and it makes your head ache, and you're liable to blood poisonin'. One the girls fainted and had spasms, and as soon as he found it out he took her right off; and he's just like clockwork to pay. I think it'll do everything for S'tira to be along 'th me there, where ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... beat a dog was no longer a matter of any moment. The stick was laid on with the utmost indifference, and a great fool was made of those who pitied the animals, as if they had any feeling. They said they were only clockwork, and that the cries they uttered when they were beaten were no more than the noise of some little spring that had been moved, and that all this involved no sensation. They nailed the poor animals upon boards by the fore-paws, in order ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... raid on the Begum's palace," explained Archie rapidly. "Dahlia decoys the Chief Mucilage; you, Thomas, drive the submarine; Myra has charge of the clockwork mouse, and we others hang about and sing. To say more at this stage would be to ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... same moment to press down another key at the other end of the line of wire. Moreover, the key at the farther end of the line could be so arranged as to make an impression on a piece of paper that was slowly drawn under it by clockwork. Now if the man at one end of the line held his key down for only an instant, this impression would look like a dot. If he held it down longer, it would look like a short dash. Morse combined these dots and dashes into an alphabet. For instance, one dash meant the letter "t," and so on. ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing
... England hear a great deal, we hear far too much, about the economic energy of industrial America, about the money of Mr. Morgan, or the machinery of Mr. Edison. We never realise that while we in England suffer from the same sort of successes in capitalism and clockwork, we have not got what the Americans have got; something at least to balance it in the way of a free agriculture, a vast field of free farms dotted with small freeholders. For the reason I shall mention in a moment, they are not perhaps in the fullest and finest ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... about it. For five-and-twenty years he had lived by clockwork. But it was by Jefferson clockwork, not London clockwork. He had changed his longitude, but not himself. The habits of a quarter of a century were not to be shifted at the bidding of ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... his mount comprehended the fact that he had met a master, and, moderating his first furious burst of speed, settled down into a league-devouring stride, crest low, limbs gathering and stretching with the elegant precision of clockwork. His rider, regaining his poise, found time to look about him and began to enjoy, for all his cares, this wild race through the ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... matter which grated against Beethoven's love of Bohemianism; to be forced to dress for dinner, especially at a set hour of the day, was to him an abomination not to be suffered. The workings of his genius were not to be regulated by the clockwork contrivances of civilised life, and hence he first took to dining out at some tavern, where he could be at his ease, and finally went altogether into lodgings. But the Prince and Princess, like the good, sensible people they were, ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... 1914.—To-day our new organisation is working like clockwork. In Cruger's formerly calm chancery there are five typewriters pounding away, and at the committee rooms there are swarms of people working to take care of odds and ends. Monsieur de Leval has a table at one side of my room, and ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... book on the electric light. Mr. Hedges' lamp belongs to the same category of electric regulators as the lamp of M. Rapieff, and to one form of M. Reynier's lamp, that is to say, the position of the ends of the carbons, and therefore of the arc, is determined not by clockwork or similar controlling mechanism, but by the locus of the geometrical intersection of the axes of the carbon rods, the positions of which axes being determined by simple ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... apparatus with a clockwork arrangement set to close the circuit at a certain time. That is why Monsieur X was not involved in his ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... feeling that nothing can matter in the world now, has kept me from caring or asserting myself in any way. I feel numb. I seem to be a person listening from some gallery when they all speak around me, and that the Ambrosine who answers placidly is an automaton who moves by clockwork. ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... her head. "The dear knows," she said, "but something must 'a' happened to him, sure. He's been steady as clockwork since ever he took that room upstairs, I'll say that for him." She sighed as she ...
— The Bishop's Shadow • I. T. Thurston
... the film, the record taken from the Map itself, accurate as clockwork. The white dot was moving in toward the red dot at a forty-degree angle. For an instant it looked as though the two were colliding ... and then the distance between them began to widen again. Slowly, hour by hour, the white dot was moving ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... information I obtained was briefly this: that Nature, in Skitzland, never removes the stomach. Every man has to feed himself; and the necessity for finding food, joined to the necessity for buying clothes, is a mainspring whereby the whole clockwork of civilized life is kept in motion. Now, if a man positively can not feed and clothe himself, he becomes a pauper. He then goes to the Workhouse, where he has his stomach filled with a cement. That stopping lasts a life-time, and he thereafter needs no food. His body, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... investigations. For it may fairly be said that every subject of a distinctly practical nature, which could be advanced by mathematical knowledge, had an interest for him: and his incessant industry enabled him to find time for many of them. Amongst such subjects were Tides and Tidal Observations, Clockwork, and the Strains in Beams and Bridges. A certain portion of his time was also given to Lectures, generally on current astronomical questions, for he held it as his duty to popularize the science as far as lay in his power. And he attended ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... ends, to carry off to the great elephant, standing just then in the best bit of shade he could find, flapping his great ears about, blinking his little pig's eyes, and turning his trunk and his tail into two pendulums, swinging them backwards and forwards as regular as clockwork, and all the time watching Harry, when Measles says all at once, "Here come ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... his forward course, but this didn't check the action of his clockwork legs, which now scudded along as swiftly as before, into the very heart of ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... grew pale as the sounds of riot broke louder on the ear, and they discovered that they were approaching instead of leaving the danger—and though Tignonville for an instant thought him mad, and snatched at the Countess's rein—his men-at-arms, who knew him, galloped stolidly on, passed like clockwork the end of the street, and, reckless of the stream of persons hurrying in the direction of the alarm, heedless of the fright and anger their passage excited, pressed steadily on. A moment and the gate through which they had entered the previous evening appeared before them. And—a sight ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... Each time the boss would gather up the lobster and personally introduce him to the newcomers, just as he had done in our case, by poking the monster under their noses and making him wriggle to show that he was really alive and not operated by clockwork, and enthusiastically dilating upon his superior attractions, which, he assured them, would be enormously enhanced if only messieurs would agree forthwith to partake of him in a broiled state. But there were ...
— Eating in Two or Three Languages • Irvin S. Cobb
... dancing isn't worth knowing, and he says all the steps that can be done with two legs have been done, and for anything really novel another leg must be added. So he's had a clockwork leg made, and he winds it up before beginning and makes its movements blend in with the steps of his real legs, and the effect ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... all events, that was the condition of mind in which I found myself as I paced the spacious poop, hour after hour, sometimes accompanied by Polson, sometimes conversing with Tudsbery, and occasionally alone. As I walked, my glances travelled, with the regularity of clockwork, first to windward, then ahead, then aloft, and finally—as I reached the binnacle—into the compass bowl; then away out to windward again, and so on, ad infinitum, until I was fairly bone- weary, and had completely walked off all ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... once more to interest in affairs, the morning was well spent. On the river the work was going forward with the precision of clockwork. The six-foot lowering of the sluice-way had produced a fine current, which sucked the logs down from above. Men were busily engaged in "sacking" them from the sides of the pond toward its centre, lest the lowering ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... description, gay with shining coloured globes and wax lights and paper lanterns; laden with mysterious packages in white paper, tied with ribbon of red, white and blue, and with other things about which there was no mystery—clockwork toys, field guns and ambulance wagons, and a big, splendid Red Cross nurse, difficult to consider a mere doll. Never was seen such a laden tree; it's branches groaned under the weight they bore. And beside it, who but Father ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... the world was presently to know more, and the same must be said of another inventor, Dr. Barton, of Beckenham, who shortly completed an airship model carrying aeroplanes and operated by clockwork. In an early experiment this model travelled four miles in ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... prestige, and patronage. You smile, Monsieur, but no longer, as formerly, are they the centres of life, of emulation, and of light, civic schools and manly gymnasiums; they have become merely simple, passive clockwork; and that is the case with the rest, Monsieur de Camors. Our municipal institutions are a mere farce, our provincial assemblies only a name, our local liberties naught! Consequently, we have not now a man for a deputy. But why should we complain? Does not Paris undertake to live, ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... roof and make sure that everything is in order. At ten minutes to twelve, I hoist into place the two arms to which our wires are secured, stretching them tight by means of the winch which we have provided, and then I at once start the clockwork. I then descend, make my way to the tram-station, and take a third-class ticket to Colmar, where I will await you at Valentin's cabaret. If you do not arrive by sundown, I am to go on to ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... and Dr. Johnson says he would go to it to find the most poetical paragraph in the range of English poetry. Congreve died in 1729, leaving his gains to the Duchess of Marlborough, who cherished his memory in a very original fashion. She had a statue of him in ivory, which went by clockwork, and was daily seated at her table; and another wax-doll imitation, whose feet she caused to be blistered and anointed by physicians, as the poet's gouty extremities ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee |
