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We sleep, allowing gravity to hold us, allowing Earth - our larger body - to recalibrate our neurons, composting the keen encounters of our waking hours (the tensions and terrors of our individual days), stirring them back, as dreams, into the sleeping substance of our muscles. (David Abram)
He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. (Aeschylus)
It's at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull. I don't know if anyone has ever pointed out that great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind. (Brian Aldiss)
What probing deep / Has ever solved the mystery of sleep? (Thomas Bailey Aldrich)
It was an hour and a half plane ride, so I slept. I try to sleep because that's probably the only time I get to get my real sleep. When I can't sleep I read books or watch movies. (Keren Ann)
But I need to wake up somehow. Or maybe not. Maybe it's best to get through the day half-asleep. Maybe that's the only way to get through today. (Jay Asher)
The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows. (Gaston Bachelard)
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning. (Honore de Balzac)
We sleep, but the loom of life never sleeps and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up tomorrow. (Henry Ward Beecher)
Wake up laughing. (Swami Beyondananda)
My life has been regulated by insomnia. (Louise Bourgeois)
I love to write out of doors and sleep out of doors, too. If I sleep under the open sky it becomes part of the writing experience, part of my insulation from the world. (Margaret Bourke-White)
Do at least one good sketch each day and you'll sleep like a kitten each night. (Harley Brown)
There, that is our secret: go to sleep! You will wake, and remember, and understand. (Robert Browning)
The best thing about the bedroom was the bed. I liked to stay in bed for hours, even during the day with covers pulled up to my chin. It was good in there, nothing ever occurred in there, no people, nothing. (Charles Bukowski)
Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone. (Anthony Burgess)
I cannot sleep - great joy is as restless as great sorrow. (Fanny Burney)
It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep. (John Cage)
People say, 'I'm going to sleep now,' as if it were nothing. But it's really a bizarre activity. 'For the next several hours, while the sun is gone, I'm going to become unconscious, temporarily losing command over everything I know and understand. When the sun returns, I will resume my life.' (George Carlin)
If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there and worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the loss of sleep. (Dale Carnegie)
I tend to stay up late, not because I'm partying but because it's the only time of the day when I'm alone and don't have to be performing. (Jim Carrey)
-Journey to the End of the Night...
My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I'd never have written a line. (Louis-Ferdinand Celine)
As a purely mathematical fact, people who sleep less live more. (Amy Chua)
We were not made by Nature to work, or even to play, from eight o'clock in the morning till midnight. We ought to break our days and our marches into two. (Winston Churchill)
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there. (Emile M. Cioran)
The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world. (Leonard Cohen)
Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing, / Beloved from pole to pole! (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
You don't swing where you sleep. (Sammy Davis, Jr.)
Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together. (Thomas Dekker)
I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake. (Rene Descartes)
When I'm near the end of a book, I need to sleep in the same room with it. (Joan Didion)
Thrown like a star in my vast sleep / I open my eyes to take a peep / To find that I was by the sea / Gazing with tranquillity. (Donovan)
How in blazes can you get a good night's sleep when you're worried about getting a good night's sleep? It's sometimes a tossup as to which is heavier--the pressure to sleep well or the pressure to do well in the activity being slept for. (Dennis Drabelle)
No, I slept as I always do when I am bored and have not the courage to amuse myself, or when I am hungry and have not the desire to eat. (Alexandre Dumas)
- Adventures in Czarist Russia...
Sleeping on a plank has one advantage - it encourages early rising. (Alexandre Dumas)
Throughout the day I often ask myself, Could I fall asleep right now? and the answer is always a resounding yes. (Lena Dunham)
I get my best ideas first thing in the morning before I'm fully awake. Sometimes I design a whole project in my sleep. I think it is about self-permission to extend your energies that makes things move along. (Nic East)
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers. (Ralph Ellison)
- The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year...
When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left. (Louise Erdrich)
The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep. (W. C. Fields)
Sleep - the most beautiful experience in life - except drink. (W. C. Fields)
I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning. (Benjamin Franklin)
When I'm alone, I can sleep crossways in bed without an argument. (Zsa Zsa Gabor)
Man should forget his anger before he lies down to sleep. (Mahatma Gandhi)
I had a new idea in my head... this time it's just simply my bedroom, only here colour is to do everything, and, giving by its simplification a grander style to things, is to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general. In a word, to look at the picture ought to rest the brain or rather the imagination. (Vincent van Gogh)
The sleep of reason produces monsters. (Francisco de Goya)
It is better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about them afterward. (Baltasar Gracian)
-The Fault in Our Stars...
As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once. (John Green)
Go to sleep thinking about what you're going to do first thing tomorrow. (Irwin Greenberg)
They never relax or lie down, so I would draw them when they would be sleeping and, one day, I realized I had the whole universe here ahead of me: their soft eyes, their swirls of fur, their spirits... (Wendy Grossman)
-An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth...
Wow, that was a really good sleep. I feel great. Hmm, that sounds like someone on the radio; maybe I'm still dreaming. Weird - the guy sounds a bit like Denis. Wait a sec. That is Denis. What's going on? Am I in an airplane? (Chris Hadfield, astronaut)
That time, straight from sleep, when I'm still in touch with my subconscious, is the most creative and important part of my day. (Margot Hattingh)
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know? (Ernest Hemingway)
I sleep eight hours a day and at least ten at night. (Bill Hicks)
A night of sleep is as much preparation for the subsequent day's activity as it is recovery from that of the previous day. (J. Allan Hobson)
I get up about four times a night and go back to sleep, or not. Then I swill tea around 8 a.m. I answer e-mail, while I stall thinking about whatever scares me. (Jenny Holzer)
There is only one thing people like that is good for them; a good night's sleep. (Edgar Watson Howe)
That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep. (Aldous Huxley)
- On the Road...
I just won't sleep, I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do. (Jack Kerouac)
Let us sleep by rivers and purify our ears. (Jack Kerouac)
Lying in bed just before going to sleep is the worst time for organized thinking; it is the best time for free thinking. Ideas drift like clouds in an undecided breeze, taking first this direction and then that. (E. L. Konigsburg)
Sleep is the best meditation. (Dalai Lama)
I had a dream that I was awake and I woke up to find myself asleep. (Stan Laurel)
Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep. (Fran Lebowitz)
Sleep... Oh! how I loathe those little slices of death... (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
Last night as I was sleeping, / I dreamt - marvellous error! - / that I had a beehive / here inside my heart. / And the golden bees were making white combs / and sweet honey / from my old failures. (Antonio Machado)
I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had. (Thomas Mann)
I don't remember any dream. All I remember is waking up and feeling that there had been a change while I was sleeping. (Brice Marden)
I was tired. I hadn't slept eight hours in two, three years. I lived on four, five hours of sleep. You can do it during a campaign because thousands are screaming for you. You're getting adrenaline shots each day. Then the campaign ends, and there are no more shots. (George McGovern)
Cats sleep in a state of total abandon, and I find that state very interesting in people as well. (Mary Beth McKenzie)
Daytime naps can be one way to treat sleep deprivation. You can get incredible benefits from 15 to 20 minutes of napping. You reset the system and get a burst of alertness and increased motor performance. (Sara C. Mednick)
There's a strange sensation - you recall it from childhood - about sleeping in the afternoon. You rise into a different world from the one in which you lay down. The shadows have been rearranged. There's a sensation of sad sweetness, as if something has been overlooked. (Jacquelyn Mitchard)
It's a security, sound. I sleep with a sound. (Joan Mitchell)
I still don't know where I am going to sleep tomorrow. (Claude Monet)
-in Belle Ile...
Despite my exhaustion I have a devil of a time getting to sleep because of the rats above my bed and a pig who lives beneath my room... (Claude Monet)
I'm in favor of approaching both the night and the day with intention. (Robert Moss)
Sleep, those tiny slices of death, how i despise them! (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
When I sleep every night, / what am I called or not called? / And when I wake, who am I / if I was not I while I slept? (Pablo Neruda)
- from In the Tower...
It's hard to tell / if we close our eyes or if night / opens in us other starred eyes, / if it burrows into the wall of our dream / till some other door opens. / But the dream
is only the flitting costume of one moment, / is spent in one beat / of the darkness, / and falls at our feet, cast off / as the day stirs and sails away with us. (Pablo Neruda)
Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
We get just as much sleep as we really need, to be who we need to be. (David Oleski)
Forgive me if I sleep until I wake up. (Charles Olson)
When one realises one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake. (P. D. Ouspensky)
I sleep and I unsleep. On the other side of me, beyond where I lie down, the silence of the house touches infinity. I hear time falling, drop by drop, and no falling drop is heard falling. (Fernando Pessoa)
There was a time when fire and story would fall asleep in unison. It was dream time. (Philippe Petit)
This moment where we think we rest, when the brain is floating, you know, in sleep, is actually a moment where I could be very creative in a very strange, uncontrolled way. (Philippe Petit)
Mother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when I went to bed. This was the best time of day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go. (Sylvia Plath)
Sleep and I do not have a good relationship. We have never been good friends. I am constantly chasing sleep and then pushing it away. A good night's sleep is my white whale. Like Ahab, I am also a total drama queen about it. I love to talk about how little sleep I get. I brag about it, as if it is a true indication of how hard I work. (Amy Poehler)
Sleep helps you win at life. (Amy Poehler)
I'd fallen asleep thinking I was much too tired to go on working and if I went on working, I'd lose it. I'd get a better hold of it in the morning; feel stronger. But I looked and looked at it and it seemed to me there was nothing to do. (Milton Resnick)
Sleep, riches, and health, to be truly enjoyed, must be interrupted. (Jean Paul Richter)
Sleeping at last, the trouble and tumult over, / Sleeping at last, the struggle and horror past, / Cold and white, out of sight of friend and of lover, / Sleeping at last. (Christina Rossetti)
People are going back and forth across the door sill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep. (Rumi)
When I am with you, we stay up all night. When you're not here, I can't go to sleep. Praise God for those two insomnias! And the difference between them. (Rumi)
Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
A man can do only what he can do. But if he does that each day he can sleep at night and do it again the next day. (Albert Schweitzer)
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care, / The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, / Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, / Chief nourisher in life's feast. (William Shakespeare)
Most people organize their time around everything but the body's natural rhythms... Morning people tend to wake up and go to sleep earlier and to be most productive early in the day. Evening people tend to wake up later, start more slowly and peak in the evening.These body rhythms hold true regardless of how much you've slept or how recently you've eaten. (Sue Shellenbarger)
Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, / Ease after war, death after life does greatly please. (Edmund Spenser)
It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it. (John Steinbeck)
Sleep is an excellent way of listening to an opera. (James Stephens, author)
I find that when you have a real interest in life and a curious life, that sleep is not the most important thing. (Martha Stewart)
-More Than Human...
He slept like an animal, well and lightly, faced in the opposite direction from that of a man; for a man going to sleep is about to escape into it, while animals are prepared to escape out of it. (Theodore Sturgeon)
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, / Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes; / Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies. (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
I think people want very much to simplify their lives enough so that they can control the things that make it possible to sleep at night. (Twyla Tharp)
I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark. (Henry David Thoreau)
The first few hours of work are non-productive. At first, I'm knotted up in problems. As time goes by these disappear into the canvas. The effects of sleep deprivation take hold, self-censorship falls away, and the real work begins. (Chase Valentine)
I haven't been to sleep for over a year. That's why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn't sleep. (Evelyn Waugh)
I couldn't go to sleep at night if the director didn't yell 'cut.' (John Wayne)
You'll be amazed how much better your paintings look after you've had a good night's sleep. (Eric Wiegardt)
In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness and we know no death. (Tom Wolfe)
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. (Virginia Woolf)
The silence that is in the starry sky, / The sleep that is among the lonely hills. (William Wordsworth)
Sleep in the bliss of God. (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi)
If you're going to do something tonight that you'll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late. (Henny Youngman)
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