quotations about sleep
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
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
Life dreams itself, contents to keep
Happy immortality, in sleep.
ARTHUR SYMONS
"Alle Zattere"
Run the streets, all day. I can sleep, when I die.
JAY WAYNE JENKINS
"Soul Survivor"
Sleep is truly a thief who ravishes our greatest treasures.
ANONYMOUS
"Early Rising", Catholic World, vol. 5
I love sleep because it is both pleasant and safe to use. Pleasant because one is in the best possible company and safe because sleep is the consummate protection against the unseemliness that is the invariable consequence of being awake.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
Metropolitan Life
Now the night is a scattering of atoms
mercury
You can't even guess at the power of this night
when sleep is restless
and the window the brink of a chasm
and all breathing becomes an empty pedestal.
MARIE UGUAY
"Oh narrow splendour of the wheat"
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"
Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
The English Patient
I softly sink into the bath of sleep:
With eyelids shut, I see around me close
The mottled, violet vapors of the deep,
That wraps me in repose.
JOSIAH GILBERT HOLLAND
"Sleeping and Dreaming"
Sleep is the station grand
Down which on either hand
The hosts of witness stand.
EMILY DICKINSON
"Sleep is supposed to be"
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
Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born:
Relieve my languish, and restore the light,
With dark forgetting of my care return.
SAMUEL DANIEL
Sonnets to Delia
Death was a friend, and sleep was Death's brother.
JOHN STEINBECK
The Grapes of Wrath
I love sleep. My life has a tendency to fall apart when I'm awake.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
attributed, Hunting for Hemingway
Now, blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep! It covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; it is meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. It is the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap, and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise man, even.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
People are typically astonished at how deeply they sleep when they put on a black-out mask of the sort airlines provide on long-haul flights. The equation here is simple: quiet eyes = quiet mind = a brain that quickly falls asleep.
RICHARD E. CYTOWIC
"Four Ways to More Restful Sleep", Psychology Today, August 24, 2017
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"
It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
Icehenge
There surely is some Life beyond
The state of man's mere waking mind:
Whereto -- Earth-blind --
Men's spirits creep
From out the sepulchre of sleep.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
"The Existence Dual", Cloudrifts at Twilight