Timekeepers Quotes

“industry without art is brutality”.”
― Simon Garfield, Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time

“You clock in to the clock. You clock out to the clock. You come home to the clock. You eat to the clock, you drink to the clock, you go to bed to the clock . . . You do that for forty years of your life, you retire, what do they fucking give you? A clock!”
― Simon Garfield, Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time

“But what actually happens in this flashbulb moment? How does a flashbulb moment seem to collide with a long exposure, something that we know to be impossible? Two small portions of our brain known as the amygdalae – groups of hyper-responsive nerve bundles in the temporal lobe concerned primarily with memory and decision-making – commandeer the rest of the brain’s functions to react in a crisis. It is something that seems to stretch a one-second fall to five seconds or more, set off by fear and sudden shocks that hit our limbic system so hard that we may never forget them. But our perceived duration distortion is just that; clock time has not in fact offered to pause or elongate for us. Instead, the amygdalae have laid down memories with far more vivid detail, and the time distortion we perceive has just happened in retrospect. The neuroscientist David Eagleman, who has conducted many experiments into time perception and as a boy experienced a similar elongation of time when he fell off a roof, explains it in terms of ‘a trick of the memory writing a story of a reality’. Our neural mechanisms are constantly attempting to calibrate the world around us into an accessible narrative in as little time as possible. Authors attempt to do the same, for what is fiction if not time repositioned, and what is history if not time in retrospect, events re-evaluated in our own time?”
― Simon Garfield, Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time

“And thus the museum took on a new role, and became a symbol and demonstration of time: time passing, time tracked, time catalogued. In some form at least, a museum is merely a chronology of its specialism, a consistent desire to order and explain events beyond randomness.”
― Simon Garfield, Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time

“I’ve come across studies that show a fascinating tendency of white-collar workers to inflate their work hours.’ This applied particularly to those employed in what she calls ‘white-collar sweatshops’, the traditionally punishing arenas of finance and tech.”
― Simon Garfield, Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time

“Conserving national resources was a sensible wish; it became a prescient necessity when the US entered the war six years later. But the desire to make the country great again may have appeared a tired political slogan even then. The belief of a better past is clearly a compelling one, but whether the past was better in the days of Taylor and Roosevelt in 1911 or in the mind of Donald Trump in 2016 is difficult to say.”
― Simon Garfield, Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time

“But nostalgia was the first disease associated with time, its victims longing for days gone by.7”
― Simon Garfield, Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time

“the OED also maintains a list of the old words we use most often, and they are words we might expect: the, be, to, of and, of course, and. But what are the most commonly used nouns? Month is at number 40. Life is number 9. Day is 5, and Year is 3. Person is at number 2, while the most commonly used noun in the English language is time.2 The OED observes that our lexicon relies on time not merely as a single word, but as a philosophy: more actions and phrases depend on time than any other. On time, last time, fine time, fast time, recovery time, reading time, all-time. The list goes on for ages. It leaves us in no doubt of time’s unassailable presence in our lives. And reading just the beginning of that list might lead one to imagine we have come too far, and are travelling too fast, to reinvent time or stop it altogether. But as we shall see in the next chapter, we once had a notion that such things were both possible and desirable.”
― Simon Garfield, Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time