quotations about insomnia
My day starts backwards ... I wake up tired and go to bed wide awake.
ANONYMOUS
For six months I couldn't sleep. With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Fight Club
The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep.
W. C. FIELDS
attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes
I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.
DAVID BENIOFF
City of Thieves
But sleep did not come. Oh, no! Nothing new came at all except that particularly wretched, itching type of insomnia which seems to rip away from one's body the whole kind, protecting skin and expose all the raw, ticklish fretwork of nerves to the mercy of a gritty blanket or a wrinkled sheet.
ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT
Molly Make-Believe
An insomnia as big
as the stars'
always
on the brink--
as it were
of some deeper utterance
some harsher
reckoning
CHARLES SIMIC
New and Selected Poems
The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.
POPPY Z. BRITE
attributed, B is for Balance
The whispering curtains confiding little chillnesses to us, as the passing of the evening dolls familiar scents and the insomnia-ridden zombies take perches, or abandon them, as in accordance with strange and un-sensitive laws. It is not like passion. It is not like the night seizing men with the singular ability to wake at all hours. It is propriety and stoic.
MATT MARKONIS
Prose-Poems
When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep ... and you're never really awake.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Fight Club
Insomnia always reminded me of switching off the old computer we had in our house when I was a kid. As it prepared to make the screen go black, a popup box would appear saying: 'Windows is shutting down.' Whenever I was unable to sleep it always left me feeling trapped in that state. Unfortunately I couldn't unplug the power cord or remove the battery to force my brain into hibernation. So I had to lie there, staring at the ceiling in a world of my own.
ALAN O'MARA
The Best Is Yet To Come
Briar Rose
was an insomniac...
She could not nap
or lie in sleep
without the court chemist
mixing her some knock-out drops
and never in the prince's presence.
ANNE SEXTON
Transformations
I've got a bad case of the 3:00 am guilts -- you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn't do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression and self-loathing.
D. D. BARANT
Dying Bites
O sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature's soft nurse, how have I frightened thee. That thou no more will weigh my eyelids down, And steep my senses in forgetfulness?
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Henry IV, Part 2
The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know.
PATRICK DEWITT
The Sisters Brothers
I'm an insomniac, my mind works the night shift.
PETE WENTZ
Gray
There is nothing so entirely desirable in all the world as a few hours' oblivion.
ANNE REEVE ALDRICH
"An Evening With Callender"
He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Pnin
Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.
GREGORY MAGUIRE
A Lion Among Men
Thin are the night-skirts left behind
By daybreak hours that onward creep,
And thin, alas! the shred of sleep
That wavers with the spirit's wind
DANTA GABRIEL ROSSETTI
"Insomnia"
Insomnia, impalpable Animal!
Is your love only cerebral?
That you came and are delighted to spy,
Under your evil eye, the man chewing
His sheets, writhing and stewing
With ennui ... under your black diamond eye.
TRISTAN CORBIERE
"Insomnia"