Literary Clock: Timely Quote

Open the app at 10:38 and you might get Dickens. In The Old Curiosity Shop, a landlord looks up at the clock and promises the stew will be done "at twenty-two minutes before eleven." A minute later it's someone else, in some other book, telling you it's 10:39.

That's the whole idea. Timely Quote is a clock that tells the time with lines from real books.

Where the quotes come from

Every passage comes from Project Gutenberg, the free library of public-domain books. There are more than 13,000 of them from over 6,000 books, and they aren't all novels. You'll get Jules Verne (Phileas Fogg is, unsurprisingly, always checking his watch) and P. G. Wodehouse. You'll also get Darwin timing how fast plants move, an admiral's account of the Grand Fleet, Victorian travel diaries, and every so often a page of the Warren Commission report. It turns out old books mention the time a lot.

A few minutes of the day haven't turned up in any book yet. There are 34 of them, if you're counting. If you land on one, you get an apology and a line from Douglas Adams instead. I'm still looking.

What you can do

Pull down to get a different quote for the same minute. Most minutes have several.

Turn on auto refresh in Settings and the quote changes on the minute, every minute, while you have the app open.

Long-press a quote, or tap the ••• button, to share it, copy it, or open the book it came from on Project Gutenberg. There you can read the whole thing for free.

Pick light, dark, or whatever your phone is set to.

The small print

There's no account, no ads, and nothing about you leaves your phone. The app is free and there's nothing to unlock. If it makes you smile, there's a tip jar in Settings. Tips are completely optional and don't change anything in the app.