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Quotations about
Daylight Saving Time
Welcome to my page of quotations about daylight saving time and its biannual time change. Here in AZ following MST we don't do DST. But I still collect quotes about it because it affects all global communities in this age of connectedness and collaboration. And ’cause they’re funny.
Cock Robin, nature's herald, declares that Spring is here. He notified the National Observatory to seize that hour of wasted daylight every morning by setting up the clocks again. ~American Stone Trade, Fred K. Irvine, ed., April 1919
It's been 4 months and I still haven't gotten over that hour I lost during Daylight Savings Time. ~Keith Wynn, 2017
The clocks are all turned forward from Funny Time to Right Time. I always remember, "Spring back or Fall in." ~David J. Beard (1947–2016), tweet, 2008
In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
~Robert Louis Stevenson, "Bed in Summer," A Child's Garden of Verses, 1885 [Yes, it's from before DST was implemented. Yes, it's about children's bedtimes. But it's still funny.
...what a falling off the centuries have seen in men's customs. The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for Nature to follow. Now we just set the clock an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase. ~E.B. White, "Hot Weather," One Man's Meat, 1942
In Spring when maple buds are red,
We turn the Clock an hour ahead;
Which means, each April that arrives,
We lose an hour
Out of our lives.
Who cares? When Autumn birds in flocks
Fly southward, back we turn the Clocks,
And so regain a lovely thing—
That missing hour
We lost last Spring.
~Phyllis McGinley (1905–1978), "Daylight Saving Time"
I don't use Daylight Savings Time for an extra hour of sleep. I use it for an extra hour of coffee-drinking! ~Keith Wynn, 2017
You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe "Daylight Saving Time." ~Dave Barry,
But fully to digest the spirit of this dicephalous diffusion, it is necessary to escalate retrospectively to the earliest instance of daylight-slaving, consequent on Uncle Adam's paucity of perception in failing to swallow the core. The occasion, besides establishing the fact that it was the serpent who first slipped over the slogan "Eat More Fruit," proved to be an ominous omen to man, who on account of Adam's failure to comply with the Orchard Act, was obliged to hitch up his hosiery and handle a hoe. Protestingly he proceeded to dig Old Man Earth in the ribs until he in his turn realised the necessity of hoisting his "holeproofs" and attending to his greengroceries, with the result that man plucked from his bosom herbaceous haberdashery both edible and elegant.
From this moment man experienced the psychological solecism, "Pride of Place," and out of his uppishness, combined with this access of agricultural activity, there sprang towns, like corns on the cuticle of cultivation, or excrescences on the hands of husbandry, thus proving that the Town and Country are really one, the town being merely the country with its hat on.
To quote the quips of Barnyard Stripling, the pastoral
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published 2002 Sep 19
revised 2017 Dec 2
last saved 2024 Apr 12
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