quotations about sleep
When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Blue Jay's Dance
There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes , which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it, and enable it to ramble as it pleases. So far as an overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter inability to control our thoughts or power of motion can be called sleep, this is it; and yet we have a consciousness of all that is going on about us, and even if we dream, words which are really spoken, or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost a matter of impossibility to separate the two.
CHARLES DICKENS
Oliver Twist
Eat, sleep, rave, repeat
FATBOY SLIM
"Eat Sleep Rave Repeat"
Sleeping people are so remote.... Right here, but out of communication. That's what strikes humans as uncanny about sleep. Its utter privacy. The sleeper turns his back on everyone.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Dream that sleep is a sunlit meadow
Drowsy with a dream of bees
Threading sun, and the shadow
Where you lie lulled by their sunlit industries.
Let the murmurous bees of sleep
Tread down honey in honeycomb.
Heart-deep now, your dream will keep
Sweet in that deep comb for time to come.
Dream the sweetness coming on.
Dream, sweet son.
Sleep on.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
"Lullaby: Smile in Sleep"
Sleep is God. Go worship.
JIM BUTCHER
Death Masks
I'm so good at sleeping I can do it with my eyes closed.
ANONYMOUS
Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
WILLIAM GOLDING
Pincher Martin
One truly ought to enter upon sleep as into a strange, fair chapel. Fragrant and melodious antechamber of the unseen, sleep is a novitiate for the beyond.
EDWARD THOMAS
"Autumn Thoughts", Atlantic Monthly, September 1902
Sleep, those little slices of death -- how I loathe them.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
attributed, Survival, issue 1
One-half of life is admitted by us to be passed in sleep, in which, however it may appear otherwise, we have no perception of truth, and all our feelings are delusions: who knows but the other half of life, in which we think we are awake, is a sleep also, but in some respects different from the other, and from which we wake when we, as we call it, sleep--as a man dreams often that he is dreaming, crowding one dreamy delusion on another.
BLAISE PASCAL
Thoughts on Religion and Other Subjects
Good sleep can be so glorious as to be some people's favorite activity. Not much else matters at 2 a.m. when you're restless and staring at the ceiling. As time ticks by, this alertness can start to feel oppressive. After all, sleep is one of the most basic physiologic states during a human day, and a lack of it wreaks havoc on both mind and body.
RICHARD E. CYTOWIC
"Four Ways to More Restful Sleep", Psychology Today, August 24, 2017
To achieve the impossible dream, try going to sleep.
JOAN KLEMPNER
Women's Health, April 2006
The truth is, everyone has different sleep requirements -- some people needing as little as four hours and others up to 10. A good night's sleep is one where you wake up feeling well rested and refreshed, irrespective of how many hours you've had.
GUY MEADOWS
"Health myths debunked: How to cook your veg, how much sunlight is harmful and how many hours sleep you really need", Mirror, August 29, 2017
Sleep is a state essentially different from death, to which some authors have erroneously likened it. It merely suspends that portion of life, which serves to keep up with outward objects an intercourse necessary to our existence. One may say that sleep and waking call each other, and are of mutual necessity. The organs of sense and motion, weary of acting, rest; but there are many circumstances favouring this cessation of their activity. A continual excitation of the organs of sense would keep them continually awake; the removal of the material causes of our sensations tends, therefore, to plunge us into the arms of sleep; wherefore we indulge in it more voluptuously in the gloom and the stillness of night. Our organs fall asleep one after the other; the smell, the taste, and the sight are already at rest, when the hearing and the touch still send up faint impressions. The perceptions, awhile confused, in the end disappear: the internal senses cease acting; as well as the muscles allotted to voluntary motion, whose action is entirely subject to that of the brain.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
A History of the Earth and Animated Nature
How lovely is the heaven of this night,
How deadly still its earth. The forest brute
Has crept into his cave, and laid himself
Where sleep has made him harmless like the lamb:
The horrid snake, his venom now forgot,
Is still and innocent as the honied flower
Under his head:--and man, in whom are met
Leopard and snake--and all the gentleness
And beauty of the young lamb and the bud,
Has let his ghost out, put his thoughts aside
And lent his senses unto death himself;
Whereby the King and beggar all lie down
On straw or purple-tissue, are but bones
And air, and blood, equal to one another
And to the unborn and buried: so we go
Placing ourselves among the unconceived
And the old ghosts, wantonly, smilingly,
For sleep is fair and warm.
THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES
"Lines"
Sleep is a belonging to all; even if all songs are old songs and the singing heart is snuffed out like a switchman's lantern with the oil gone, even if we forget our names and houses in the finish, the secret of sleep is left us, sleep belongs to all, sleep is the first and last and best of all.
CARL SANDBURG
"Work Gangs"
In sleep we are living corpses, we are the prey of an unknown power which seizes us in spite of ourselves, and shows itself in the oddest shapes.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
What a blessing man acknowledges in sleep, whose soft oblivion makes an island of every day, and breaks the hold of continuous care; that cools the hot brain, and bathes the weary eye-lids, and lets the buffeted and foundering heart cast anchor every night in some harbor of happy dreams. He feels the beneficence of that law which makes even misery halt, and besieging fortune strike its tents, and in the great democracy of nature levels the children of men in common helplessness and common need; finding no conditions so wretched, no spot so bleak that even the most desperate cannot recline nearer to the bosom of the common mother, and forget for a little while their sorrow and their shame.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Sleep is the station grand
Down which on either hand
The hosts of witness stand.
EMILY DICKINSON
"Sleep is supposed to be"