"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman Quotes

“Why let them order you about? Why let them tell you to hurry and scurry like ants or maggots? Take your time! Saunter a while! Enjoy the sunshine, enjoy the breeze, let life carry you at your own pace! Don't be slaves of time, it's a helluva way to die, slowly, by degrees...down with the Ticktockman!”
― Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman

“Jelly beans! Millions and billions of purples and yellows and greens and licorice and grape and raspberry and mint and round and smooth and crunchy outside and soft-mealy inside and sugary and bouncing jouncing tumbling clittering clattering skittering fell on the heads and shoulders and hardhats and carapaces of the Timkin works, tinkling on the slidewalk and bouncing away and rolling about underfoot and filling the sky on their way down with all the colors of joy and childhood and holidays, coming down in a steady rain, a solid wash, a torrent of color and sweetness out of the sky from above, and entering a universe of sanity and metronomic order with quite-mad coocoo newness. Jelly beans!”
― Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman

“And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes goes goes goes goes tick tock tick tock tick tock and one day we no longer let time serve us, we serve time and we are slaves of the schedule, worshipers of the sun's passing, bound into a life predicated on restrictions because the system will not function if we don't keep the schedule tight.”
― Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman

“You're a nonconformist.”
“That didn’t used to be a felony.”
“It is now. Live in the world around you.”
― Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman

“Don't come back till you have him!" the Ticktockman said, very quietly, very sincerely, extremely dangerously.

They used dogs. They used probes. They used cardioplate crossoffs. They used teepers. They used bribery. They used stiktytes. They used intimidation. They used torment. They used torture. They used finks. They used cops. They used search&seizure. They used fallaron. They used betterment incentive. They used fingerprints. They used the Bertillon system. They used cunning. They used guile. They used treachery. They used Raoul Mitgong, but he didn't help much. They used applied physics. They used techniques of criminology.

And what the hell: they caught him.”
― Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman

“They’re not nuts, friends, they’re simply seeing it all through different eyes. They have imagination, and they know something about being alone and in pain. They’re altering the real world to fit their fantasies. That’s okay.
We all do it. Don’t say you don’t. How many of you have come out of the movie, having seen Bullitt or The French Connection or Vanishing Point or The Last American Hero or Freebie and the Bean, gotten in your car, and just about done a wheelie, sixty-five mph out of the parking lot? Don’t lie to me, gentle reader, we all have weird-looking mannerisms that seem perfectly rational to us, but make onlookers cock an eyebrow and cross to the other side of the street.
I’ve grown very fond of people who can let it out, who can have the strength of compulsion to indulge their special affectations. They seem to me more real than the faceless gray hordes of sidewalk sliders who go from there to here without so much as a hop, skip, or a jump.”
― Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman

“Master Timekeeper: Not everyone thinks so. Most people enjoy order.
Harlequin: I don't, and most of the people I know don't."
Master Timekeeper: That's not true. How do you think we caught you?
Harlequin: I'm not interested.
Master Timekeeper: A girl named pretty Alice told us who you were.
Harlequin: That's a lie.
Master Timekeeper: It's true. You unnerve her. She wants to belong, she wants to conform,
I'm going to turn you off.”
― Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman

“The shiftworkers howled and laughed and were pelted, and broke ranks, and the jelly beans managed to work their way into the mechanism of the slidewalks after which there was a hideous scraping as the sound of a million fingernails rasped down a quarter of a million blackboards, followed by a coughing and a sputtering, and then the slidewalks all stopped and everyone was dumped thisawayandthataway in a jackstraw tumble, still laughing and popping little jelly bean eggs of childish color into their mouths. It was a holiday, and a jollity, an absolute insanity, a giggle. But...
The shift was delayed seven minutes.
They did not get home for seven minutes.
The master schedule was thrown off by seven minutes.
Quotas were delayed by inoperative slidewalks for seven minutes.
He had tapped the first domino in the line, and one after another, like chik chik chik, the others had fallen.
The System had been seven minutes' worth of disrupted.”
― Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman