quotations about 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
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
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
Themes and Variations
Sleep soothes and arrests the fever-pulse of the soul.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
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 gateway to those nightly visitations of the irrational.
GAYLE GREENE
Insomniac
I love sleep. My life has a tendency to fall apart when I'm awake.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
attributed, Hunting for Hemingway
In order to live the life of night, a watcher must not wake too much. That is, he should not alter so greatly the character of night as to lose the solitude, the visible darkness, or the quietude. The hours of sleep are too much altered when they are filled by lights and crowds; and Nature is cheated so, and evaded, and her rhythm broken, as when the larks caged in populous streets make ineffectual springs and sing daybreak songs when the London gas is lighted. Nature is easily deceived; and the muse, like the lark, may be set all astray as to the hour. You may spend the peculiar hours of sleep amid so much noise and among so many people that you shall not be aware of them; you may thus merely force and prolong the day. But to do so is not to live well both lives; it is not to yield to the daily and nightly rise and fall and to be cradled in the swing of change.
ALICE MEYNELL
"The Hours of Sleep", The Spirit of Place and Other Essays
There are hours claimed by Sleep, but refused to him. None the less are they his by some state within the mind, which answers rhythmically and punctually to that claim. Awake and at work, without drowsiness, without languor, and without gloom, the night mind of man is yet not his day mind; he has night-powers of feeling which are at their highest in dreams, but are night's as well as sleep's. The powers of the mind in dreams, which are inexplicable, are not altogether baffled because the mind is awake; it is the hour of their return as it is the hour of a tide's, and they do return. In sleep they have their free way. Night then has nothing to hamper her influence, and she draws the emotion, the senses, and the nerves of the sleeper. She urges him upon those extremities of anger and love, contempt and terror to which not only can no event of the real day persuade him, but for which, awake, he has perhaps not even the capacity. This increase of capacity, which is the dream's, is punctual to the night, even though sleep and the dream be kept at arm's length.
ALICE MEYNELL
"The Hours of Sleep", The Spirit of Place and Other Essays
It is a delicious moment, certainly, that of being well nestled in bed, and feeling that yon shall drop gently to sleep. The good is to come, not past; the limbs have just been tired enough to render the remaining in one posture delightful; the labor of the day is gone. A gentle failure of the perceptions creeps over you; the spirit of consciousness disengages itself once more, and with a slow and hushing degrees, like a mother detaching her hand from that of a sleeping child, the wind seems to have a balmy lid closing over it, like the eye--it is closed--the mysterious spirit has gone to take its airy rounds.
LEIGH HUNT
The Indicator, January 12, 1820
Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work and helps make something of the world.
HERACLITUS
Fragments
Sleep is a natural reset button for our brain and body.
HANSA VENKATESWARAN
"Do you wake up looking tired or with dull skin? Here's what your morning face says about your health", Economic Times, August 29, 2017
Thou silent power, whose welcome sway
Charms every anxious thought away;
In whose divine oblivion drown'd,
Sore pain and weary toil grow mild,
Love is with kinder looks beguiled,
And Grief forgets her fondly cherish'd wound;
Oh, whither hast thou flown, indulgent god?
God of kind shadows and of healing dews,
Whom dost thou touch with thy Lethæan rod?
Around whose temples now thy opiate airs diffuse?
MARK AKENSIDE
"To Sleep"
Thus we travel from sleep to sleep, learning again to dream.
NICO SLATE
Where Nothing Needs To Be Said
All men, whilst they are awake, are in one common world: but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own.
HERACLITUS
attributed, The Spectator, September 18, 1755
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
Let youth cherish sleep, the happiest of earthly boons, while yet it is at their command; for there cometh the day to all, when neither the voice of the lute nor the bird shall bring back the sweet slumbers that fell on their young eyes as unbidden as the dews.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
attributed, The Book of Humour, Wit & Wisdom: A Manual of Table-talk
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
Welcome is sleep, more welcome the sleep of stone
Whilst crime and shame continue in the land;
My happy fortune, not to see or hear;
Waken me not--in mercy, whisper low.
MICHELANGELO
Walks in Florence
Sleep, delicious and profound, the very counterfeit of death.
HOMER
The Odyssey