Awake At Night Quotes & Sayings

Do you lie awake at night to come up with all your witty replies for the following day? — Sarah J. Maas

The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night ... All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, All intelligences awake with the morning. — Henry David Thoreau

One thing that keeps me awake at night: I am a mother and, I have to confess with great delight, a grandmother of five girls, which gives me great hope for the future - girl power! Can I say that without alienating all of the men? — Queen Noor Of Jordan

Love is something girls hope for when they don't know better, something women long for when they lie awake at night, and something they'll only ever get from their children. Men don't have time for such notions. — Cora Reilly

He thought of all the quaint Victorian houses in Wayward Pines and of all the families who lived inside them. How many residents - inmates - kept up a strong, carefree countenance during the day, but then lay awake at night, sleepless, minds racing, terrified and struggling to comprehend why they'd been locked away in this scenic prison? He imagined more than a few. But human beings were, if nothing else, adaptable. — Blake Crouch

I am strongly of the opinion that, after the age of twenty-one, a man ought not to be out of bed and awake at four in the morning. The hour breeds thought. At twenty-one, life being all future, it may be examined with impunity. But, at thirty, having become an uncomfortable mixture of future and past, it is a thing to be looked at only when the sun is high and the world full of warmth and optimism. — P.G. Wodehouse

Good girls hold their heads high by daylight,
Their grace and their virtue soaring with kites,
While bad girls slink along in their shame-
Everyone stares at them, everyone blames.
But those bad girls sleep soundly at night,
Ne'er do their consciences wake them in a fright,
While our good girls toss and they turn-
They lay awake for those who will burn. — Anna Godbersen

It's funny how when you're up so late at night for so long your mind can get into these creative places, the kind of creative places that come to you when you're halfway between asleep and awake. — Steve Wozniak

I sometimes lie awake at night trying to think of something funny that Richard Nixon said. — Lyn Nofziger

The days seemed to stretch out toward infinity, blank and humid, without purpose, and at night I was kept awake by the endless drone of mosquitoes and helicopters. (Why wars must be contested under such conditions I shall never understand. Is not death sufficient?) — Tim O'Brien

In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another day without his presence, her heart beat like a gloved fist against her ribs. And in the morning, long before she was fully awake, she felt a longing so bitter and tight it yanked her out of a sleep swept clean of dreams. — Toni Morrison

Our culture does not teach us this, but what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas. If you cheat in Vegas, it comes right home with you. If you cheat in Vegas, you walk home as a cheater. You lie awake at a night a cheater. You cannot escape it. — Tom Shadyac

thousand CEOs, business owners, and highly successful entrepreneurs about their businesses and how they lead companies through good times and bad. One of the most important questions I ask them is "What's the biggest worry keeping you awake at night? — Jason Jennings

Insofar as I think about postmodernism at all, and it doesn't exactly keep me awake at nights, I think of it as something that happens to one, not a style one affects. We're postmoderns because we're not modernists. The modernist writers-Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williams-spoke with a kind of vatic authority: they were really the last of the Romantics, for whom authorship itself was like being a solitary prophet in the wasteland. — Jonathan Raban

What are you doing?" Sicarius's voice floated from his tree perch.
"The usual night-watch activities." She tried to keep her tone light. Neither the creepy forest nor the creepy wolves were going to make her nervous, thank you very much.
"Staying awake, counting trees, throwing fire at wolves with glowing eyes. — Lindsay Buroker

We are not of the night or of the darkness. 6So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. 7For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, are drunk at night. 8But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, — Anonymous

Her name rang in Will's mind like the chime of a bell; he wondered if any other name on earth had such an inescapable resonance to it. She couldn't have been named something awful, could she, like Mildred. He couldn't imagine lying awake at night, staring up at the ceiling while invisible voices whispered 'Mildred' in his ears. But Tessa
— Cassandra Clare

You can ignore me, Rachel, and you can try to treat me as a friend, but none of that will erase the fact that I think about kissing you every second I'm awake and dream at night of my hands on your body. And it sure as hell won't erase that I'm terrified by how much I like you. — Katie McGarry

The things that kept them awake in the middle of the night, the things they did underneath the cover of darkness, both dreadful and beautiful, both attractive and repulsive, were revealed in stark clarity to their minds. A harsh reality that intensified sensations with each gust of wind. They shrank from it with frightened whimpers. The setting in each house would have fit perfectly into a post-apocalyptic tale of nuclear holocausts. Shell-shocked expressions gazed into the nothingness. Blankets over faces, silent prayers to the heavens. No curious eyes at the windows, or storm watchers dared to partake. The mere thought of looking out was too much to be borne. — Jaime Allison Parker

Life is too short to read books whose cleverness makes them impenetrable. A good book should keep you awake at night, flickering through pages as you promise yourself just one more chapter; they shouldn't put you to sleep as you tackle a paragraph for the fifth time. — Kate Morton

There's always been some concern that adult subject matter should be quarantined from a page that attracts children. Unlike late at night, when 'South Park' and 'Colbert' are on, impressionable minds are wide awake when the newspaper arrives. — Garry Trudeau

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being "in love", which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. — Louis De Bernieres

At night when I lie awake I can hear it, quiet but unrelenting, undeniable: a whisper in my head, Slip away. When I close my eyes, my head is filled with images of past and future lives, the things I dreamed I wanted, the things I had and threw away. — Paula Hawkins

We're a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. Our children frighten us in their intimacy, but we make sure they grow up like us. Lukewarm like us. On a night like this, hands and faces hot, we can believe that tomorrow will show us angels in jars and that the well-known woods will suddenly reveal another path. — Jeanette Winterson

I had always liked darkness. When I was small I was afraid of it if I was alone, but when I was with other I loved it and the change to the world it brought. Running around in the forest or between houses was different in the darkness, the world was enchanted, and we, we were breathless adventurers with blinking eyes and pounding hearts.
When I was older there was little I liked better than to stay up at night, the silence and the darkness had an allure, they carreid the promise of something immense. And autumn was my favorite season, wandering along the road by the river in the dark and the rain, not much could beat that.
But this darkness was different. This darkness rendered everything lifeless. It was static, it was the same whether you were awake or asleep, and it became harder and harder to motivate yourself to get up in the morning. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Dorrigo, the children, her friends, and her wider family - they all existed for her as a way of divining the world. It was a far larger and more wondrous place with them than it was without them. If she hoped for the same love from Dorrigo, and if she was disappointed in her hope, she did not feel its absence as a reason not to love him. The problem was that she did. Her love was without reason and would never yield to reason. Though it longed for requital, her love in the end did not demand it.
But when he was away at night, she would lie awake, unable to sleep. And she would think of him and her and feel the most overwhelming sadness. She may have been a trusting woman but she was very far from a stupid one. She repeated his words and echoed his opinions not because she was without thoughts of her own, but because her nature was one that wished to live through others. Without love, what was the world? Just objects, things, light, darkness. — Richard Flanagan

The things that keep me awake at night are things like textures and instrumentation and plotting out what things are going to do and what the sounds are that I'm trying to capture. — Ariel Pink

They had supper and went away, and Ivan Ilyich was left alone with the consciousness that his life was poisoned and was poisoning the lives of others, and that this poison did not weaken but penetrated more and more deeply into his whole being.
With this consciousness, and with physical pain besides the terror, he must go to bed, often to lie awake the greater part of the night. Next morning he had to get up again, dress, go to the law courts, speak, and write; or if he did not go out, spend at home those twenty-four hours a day each of which was a torture. And he had to live thus all alone on the brink of an abyss, with no one who understood or pitied him. — Leo Tolstoy

Over the vistas broke a cold gray light, such as seen in those false dawns that are neither night nor true morning, when the world and all its contents seem but shapes of mist, formed in vain hope and desire ... If you awake from troubled sleep at such a time, you can only sit by the window and think of those that have been lost to you, those that followed your parents into those cold and heartless regions below the grass, silent and dark. Eventually, morning comes and the world resumes its solidity, but another tiny thread of ice has been stitched into your heart forever. — K.W. Jeter

She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she'd remember the brutal fact that had caused it. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Why me?"
"Because I lie awake at night, dreaming of all the things I want to do to your body, of leaving marks on your skin so that everyone knows that you are mine. And only mine." He leaned back against one of the larger metal tables. "But you fight yourself even as you fight me, and I love that, too. I love watching you squirm, because it gives me some idea of how you'll look when I'm inside you. I want to be your last thought at night, and your first taste at dawn. I want to teach you, own you, control you. — Nenia Campbell

One of the things that has changed my life - and this comes from someone who was highly self-critical and a type-A personality - is meditating. The simple act of making my brain shut off for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes at night may not seem like much, but what ends up happening, besides creating space in your day, is your awake posture begins to replicate your meditative posture, — Sheryl Crow

Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby. She would have been ashamed to look her family in the face the next morning, had she not risen from her bed in more need of repose than when she lay down in it. But the feelings which made such composure a disgrace, left her in no danger of incurring it. She was awake the whole night, and she wept the greatest part of it. She got up with an head-ache, was unable to talk, and unwilling to take any nourishment; giving pain every moment to her mother and sisters, and forbidding all attempt at consolation from either. Her sensibility was potent enough! — Jane Austen

When I was young I used to have this nightmare about dying. I used to lie awake at night screaming. All my schoolfriends went to heaven or hell, and I was sent to Southend. — Douglas Adams

wide awake as your soul remains tired. sitting silently under the moon as your mind continues to scream. you're losing yourself, you're losing sleep but he's losing you. some time soon, the thought of him will no longer keep you up at night. — R H Sin

Nobody lay awake at night wondering if the wheat they'd raised was truly happy and fulfilled being made into bread. — Chuck Palahniuk

I slept that night in the room I used to have when I was a little boy, with the summer wind blowing in at the windows, bringing the smell of the ripe fields. I lay awake and watched the moonlight shining over the barn and the stacks and the pond, and the windmill making its old dark shadow against the blue sky. — Willa Cather

The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn. — T.H. White

Bright Star
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors
No - yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever - or else swoon to death. — John Keats

Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk. — Hermann Hesse

Each night I lie awake and stare up at the stars and think, what the hell happened to my ceiling. — Robert Paul

He pierced her with a look. "I thought we had an agreement. I keep my men away from your ladies, and you keep your distance from me. You're not holding your end of the bargain."
"It's but a momentary interruption. Just this once."
"Just this once?" He made a dismissive noise, rifling through papers. "What about just now in the church?"
"Very well, twice."
"Try again." He stacked his papers and looked up, devouring her with his intent green gaze. "You invaded my dreams at least a half-dozen times last night. When I'm awake, you keep traipsing through my thoughts. Sometimes you're barely clothed. What excuse can you make for that?"
She stammered to form a response, her tongue tripping against her teeth. "I ... I would never traipse." Idiotic reply.
"Hm." He tilted his head and regarded her thoughtfully. "Would you saunter? — Tessa Dare

I unplug the phone and close the door and just stick with it. I don't ever go out for lunch and I don't take vacations. I like to be awake when no one else is: either just before dawn in the morning or late, late at night. Silence helps. — Mona Simpson

Night Watch
Awake for hours and staring at the ceiling
Through the unsettled stillness of the night
He grows possessed of the obsessive feeling
That dawn has come and gone and brought no light. — Vikram Seth

And so he sat, waited in the silent night, occasionally checkin his watch to stay awake, and letting his mind wanter once more. Across the decades, across the countries and across the wars. His family, his friends, the sex he'd shared and the love he'd known. Lust and laughter, anger and jealousy, and a thousand other things, and he smiled in the end. If they got him this time, at least he had lived and he regretted nothing. (Dan) — Aleksandr Voinov

That night I slept badly, thrashing about in my bed, not quite asleep and not quite awake. At times I had the feeling there was someone else in my bedroom who was talking to me, but of course I could not deal with this perception in any realistic way, since I was half-asleep and half-awake, and thus, for all practical purposes, I was out of my mind. — Thomas Ligotti

Viktor looked at the older man's nightshirt, robe, and nightcap. His lips quirked into a smile. "The hour is late, and the household sleeps. How is it that you are still awake?"
"I knew you would be knocking on the door sooner or later." Pickles looked down his long nose at him. "You have passed the previous six nights with Her Ladyship."
"You are observant, my good man."
"No, Your Highness, I am the one who locks the door at night." Pickles reached into his robe's pocket and produced a key. He passed it to the prince, saying, "After tonight, let yourself into the
house."
Viktor grinned at the majordomo and lifted the key out of his hand. "Your trust honors me."
"You are unlikely to abscond with the silver," Pickles drawled. — Patricia Grasso

But if it is love, real love, then I want them to find each other. Because I believe that love is an overwhelming, all-consuming force, and when it's genuine you can't really ignore it. No matter how long it takes. It knocks down your door by force. It keeps you awake at night. It plagues your thoughts and burn your soul. If it is love, they won't need me at all. By telling my daughter that the man of her dreams loves her too, would I not be getting in the way? Meddling with fate? — Jessica Thompson

Few occasions are as joyous to small children as funerals, almost better than the big wedding blowouts that take place at night when it's hard to stay awake. A small boy will never be harshly criticized at a funeral; he is more treasured as death comes close and all his wickedness vanishes before the inescapable fact that thank God, he is healthy. — Arthur Miller

It was an unnatural time to be awake, ... It meant nothing good. He associated it with emergency, bereavement, conspiracy, flight; the sad skulk away at the end of a one-night affair. — Robert Harris

When you have moments on your own or spaces in your time, just focus on the well at the root of your soul. Imagine that nourishing stream of belonging, ease, peace, and delight. Feel, with your visual imagination, the refreshing waters of that well gradually flowing up through the arid earth of the neglected side of your heart. It is helpful to imagine this particularly before you sleep. Then during the night you will be in a constant flow of enrichment and belonging. You will find that when you awake at dawn, there will be a lovely, quiet happiness in your spirit. One — John O'Donohue

I got what I wanted, I guess. I'm here, in this home that I worked so hard to insulate from the problems of the world, our happy little bubble. The girls have their father every night. Adam has a newfound respect for me, the New Rachel, for the glittering, sharp edge that's emerged like a razor in the grass. When I think about my old self, I feel pity and yearning at the same time. Poor Old Rachel, the sweet, naive idiot. And lucky Old Rachel, so completely happy. There's one niggling thought I can't shake, one that keeps me awake at night. What would I tell my daughters if they came to me with the news that their husband had a mistress? That he told her, my precious daughter, that sex with the other woman was amazing? Stay and work things out. Oh, and get that STD panel ASAP, darlings! But do stay. Take all that hurt and betrayal and just ball it up and swallow it. Want to bake cookies? — Kristan Higgins

Okay," I said, "what's your biggest fear?" As always, he took a second to think about the answer. "Clowns," he said. "Clowns." "Yup." I just looked at him. "What?" he said, glancing over at me. "That is not a real answer," I told him. "Says who?" "Says me. I meant a real fear, like of failure, of death, of regret. Like that. Something that keeps you awake nights, questioning your very existence." He thought for a second. "Clowns. — Sarah Dessen

Wintry morning, looking with dull eyes and sallow face upon the neighbourhood of Leicester Square, finds its inhabitants unwilling to get out of bed. Many of them are not early risers at the brightest of times, being birds of night who roost when the sun is high and are wide awake and keen for prey when the stars shine out. Behind dingy blind and curtain, in upper story and garret, skulking more or less under false names, false hair, false titles, false jewellery, and false histories, a colony of brigands lie in their first sleep. Gentlemen — Charles Dickens

awake at night?" The response is practically unanimous: Leaders worry about creating a sense of urgency in their organizations and operating quickly in an increasingly complex world. They want to create strong teams that are primed to handle any hurdle that comes their way and — Jason Jennings

There are all kinds of things that can scare you every day. What if someone you know gets cancer? What if something happens to you sister or your friends or your parents? And what if you get hit by a car crossing the street or the kids at school find out what an unnatural freak you are and what if you go too far out in the lake and the water is over your head and what if there's a fire or a war?
And you can lie awake at night and worry about these things because it's scary and unpredictable, but it's REAL. It's possible.
-Mackie Doyle, The Replacement — Brenna Yovanoff

I'd thought once, actually, of taking your mind, if you asked. I'd thought I could help you fall asleep at night."
He opened his mouth to say something. Shut it again. His face closed for a moment, his unreadable mask falling into place. He spoke softly. "But that wouldn't be fair; for after I slept you'd be left awake, with no one to help you sleep. — Kristin Cashore

Oh any sentimental person can cry at night, but when you begin to cry in the morning - to lie awake and cry in the morning - ... — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

But most of all, when Somer closes her eyes, she imagines the moment she will hold her baby for the first time. She keeps Asha's photo in her pocket and looks at it often. That one photo vaporized her doubts and made everything come to life. She lay awake at night, picturing her daughter's sweet face. — Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Had he stood outside my door as I'd stood outside his, fists at his sides, lips drawn back? Did it have him as bad as it had me? Was it eating at him, gnawing at him with the same sharp vicious little teeth that wouldn't let me sleep?
Yes, it was. I could see the rage of insatiable uninvited lust in every line of that dark, stoic face that had once been too subtly etched for me to read. I wasn't the only one lying awake at night, fevered with memories, tossing, turning, soaking my sheets, burning up
not for Fae sex, but him, damn it all to hell, him. — Karen Marie Moning

Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. It is like a bird that has blundered down the flue and is caught indoors and flutters at the windowpanes. It is like standing a long time on a cold day, knocking at a shut door. — Wendell Berry

At night it is better still. I used to lie on the pallet in the hall waiting until I could hear them all asleep, so I could get up and go back to the bucket. It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a round orifice in nothingness, where before I stirred it awake with the dipper I could see maybe a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or two before I drank. After that I was bigger, older. — William Faulkner

Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. — Jeanette Winterson

[M]y only route was trust: trust in a *deeper* wisdom, the wisdom responsible for making my heart beat, my eyes shine, my hair grow; trust in the infinite intelligence responsible for making my cells replicate; trust in the part of me that is awake when I'm asleep at night. — Brandon Bays

As a kid I'd lie awake at night and convince myself that a meteor was about to hit the Earth. It's my fatalistic streak, which I've inherited from my mum. I firmly believe something cataclysmic is going to happen in my lifetime and I have to be prepared to run for my life when the time comes. — Ellie Goulding

Reality is a magic lady, sometimes very mysterious. To me she is very passionate. She is real not only when she is awake, walking down the streets, but also at night when she is dreaming or when she is having nightmares. When I am writing, I am always paying tribute to her - to that lady called Reality. — Eduardo Galeano

On the night of our secret wedding
when he held me in his mouth like a promise
until his tongue grew tired and fell asleep,
I lay awake to keep the memory alive.
In the morning I begged him back to bed.
Running late, he kissed my ankles and left.
I stayed like a secret in his bed for days
until his mother found me.
I showed her my gold ring,
I stood in front of her naked,
waved my hands in her face.
She sank to the floor and cried.
At his funeral, no one knew my name.
I sat behind his aunts,
they sucked on dates soaked in oil.
The last thing he tasted was me. — Warsan Shire

Truman had been sitting in a chair in the bedroom with several new books stacked on a table beside him. Did the President like to read himself to sleep at night, McCormick asked. "No, young man," said Truman, "I like to read myself awake." Thomas — David McCullough

Entangled cobwebs of my mind keep me awake at night! Need to get back to sm serious writing again! — Deeba Salim Irfan

What keeps me awake at night? Just about everything! I worry that I am not there for my family enough. So what keeps me awake at night is general guilt! — Julia Sawalha

For two weeks, I lay awake at night and said Hail Marys over and over to stop my heart from beating too fast. I suddenly realized how much being a husband was about fear: fear of not being able to keep somebody safe, of not being able to protect somebody from all the bad stuff you want to protect them from. Knowing they have more tears in them than you will be able to keep them from crying. I realized that Renee had seen me fail, and that she was the person I was going to be failing in front for the rest of my life. It was just a little failure, but it promised bigger failures to come. Additional ones, anyway. But that's who your wife is, the person you fail in front of. Love it so confusing; there's no peace of mind. — Rob Sheffield

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and wonder if my life would be different if I had to do it over ... Then a voice comes to me out of the dark that says, boy, there's an original thought! — Charles M. Schulz

Regret is what you should fear the most. If something is going to keep you awake at night, let it be the fear of not following your dream. — Chris Guillebeau

When you were awake, stretched out in your bed in the dark, shutters drawn, your thoughts would flow freely. They would grow obscure when you got up and opened the curtains. The violence of daylight would efface the nocturnal clarity. In the daytime, people were barriers, dividing you up, preventing you from hearing what you listened to at night: the voice of your brain. — Edouard Leve

By then I wasn't just asking questions; I was being changed by them. I was being changed by my prayers, which dwindled down nearer and nearer to silence, which weren't confrontations with God but with the difficulty
in my own mind, or in the human lot
of knowing what or how to pray. Lying awake at night, I could feel myself being changed
into what, I had no idea. — Wendell Berry

There are boys lying awake, hating themselves. There are boys screwing for the right reasons and boys screwing for the wrong ones. There are boys sleeping on benches and under bridges, and luckier unlucky boys sleeping in shelters, which feel like safety but not like home. There are boys so enraptured by love that they can't get their hearts to slow down enough to get some rest, and other boys so damaged by love that they can't stop picking at their pain. There are boys who clutch secrets at night in the same way they clutch denial in the day. There are boys who do not think of themselves at all when they dream. There are boys who will be woken in the night. There are boys who fall asleep with phones to their ears. — David Levithan

Who isn't crazy sometimes? Who hasn't driven around a block hoping a certain person will come out; who hasn't haunted a certain coffee shop, or stared obsessively at an old picture; who hasn't toiled over every word in a letter, taken four hours to write a two-sentence email, watched the phone praying it will ring; who doesn't lay awake at night sick with the image of her sleeping with someone else? — Jess Walter

Since Monday, it has been raining buoyant summer rain shot through with sun, but dark at night and full of sound, full of dripping leaves, watery chimings, sleepless scuttlings. Billy Bob is wide-awake, dry-eyed, though everything he does is a little frozen and his tongue is as stiff as a bell tongue. It has not been easy for him, Miss Bobbit's going. Because she'd meant more than that. Than what? Than being thirteen years old and crazy in love. She was the queer things in him, like the pecan tree and liking books and caring enough about people to let them hurt him. She was the things he was afraid to show anyone else. And in the dark the music trickled through the rain: won't there be nights when we will hear it just as though it were really there? And afternoons when the shadows will be all at once confused, and she will pass before us, unfurling across the lawn like a pretty piece of ribbon? — Truman Capote

And everyone drank too much coffee too, at the wrong times and for the wrong reasons. They drank it when they came in every morning to get going, and then again in the afternoon to keep going. They ran on caffeine fumes all day and never fucking got anywhere. Then they went home spent and empty and crashed in front of the TV every night and slept away the few hours they had for themselves. All these motherfuckers are always talking about the best ways to manage your time. The fact is any time spent at work not sleeping in the bathroom is wasted time, and it's hard to sleep when you're pumped full of caffeine. Everyone's awake for the wrong part of their lives. And by the weekend they're too exhausted from all the frantic, useless activity to even care, and it's only fucking two days off anyway. Nobody has the time or the energy to do what they really want, or to even figure out what that is. — Paul Neilan

After less than a year together they now slept in separate rooms because Victor's snoring, and nothing else about him, kept her awake at night. — Edward St. Aubyn

To get the best out of life here ... Good grief. There's plenty of it about, so indulge. Give yourself some thing to remember. Fall in love. Fall out of love. Gamble. Get drunk. See how long you can stay awake. Go for long walks at night. Discover what you're afraid of doing, and then do it. — Philip Pullman

This was what was keeping me awake at night,' Walter said. 'This fragmentation. Because it's the same problem everywhere. It's like the internet, or cable TV- there's never any center, there's no communal agreement, there's just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation, it's all just cheap trash and shitty development. All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli. — Jonathan Franzen

His father asked Ethan in a raspy voice, "You spend time with your son?" "Much as I can," he'd answered, but his father had caught the lie in his eyes. "It'll be your loss, Ethan. Day'll come, when he's grown and it's too late, that you'd give a kingdom to go back and spend a single hour with your son as a boy. To hold him. Read a book to him. Throw a ball with a person in whose eyes you can do no wrong. He doesn't see your failings yet. He looks at you with pure love and it won't last, so you revel in it while it's here." Ethan thinks often of that conversation, mostly when he's lying awake in bed at night and everyone else is asleep, and his life screaming past at the speed of light - the weight of bills and the future and his prior failings and all these moments he's missing - all the lost joy - perched like a boulder on his chest. — Blake Crouch

Kurt Cilke liked dogs because they could not conspire. They could not hide hostility, and they were not cunning. They did not lie awake at night planning to rob and murder other dogs. Treachery was beyond their scope. — Mario Puzo

Real men are told, "I'm sorry, I'm not interested" or "I have a friend who is single that I would like to introduce you to" when they are rejected. That is pretty much it. No dramatic scenes, no broken hearts, no agonizing pain or suffering to keep them awake at night. It just happens, life goes on, they meet another woman, and she keeps them awake at night. — W. Anton

The night she died, Dan found her propped up in her hospital bed; she appeared to have fallen asleep with the TV on and with the remote-control device held in her hand in such a way that the channels kept changing. But she was dead, not asleep, and her cold thumb had simply attached itself to the button that restlessly roamed the channels - looking for something good. At the time, in 1989, it seemed a fairly unusual way to die. Nowadays, I suspect, more and more people are dropping off that way. And we're still looking for something good on television. We won't find it. There's precious little on TV that can keep us awake or alive. Ever the prophet, Owen Meany was right about television, too. — John Irving

It doesn't matter if it's the real world or fictional," I insisted. "Crushes are the best part of liking someone, and they are completely safe. You get all the benefits of fantasising about someone, but none of the he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not drama. It's all the good parts with none of the parts that make you lie awake at night all angsty. — Liz Czukas

I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully industrious-by fits. There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but the solitary communion with the 'mountains & the woods'-the 'altars' of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures. — Edgar Allan Poe

I lay awake for hours in my twin bed next to the other, empty bed, feeling and hearing the spruces, the hemlocks, the rhododendron scraping at the partly open window, the verdant mountain out there in the night, the burgeoning of nature that did not seem to include me. And when, my restless body asked my teeming brain, had I agreed to be excluded? — Elizabeth Kostova

Will," she said softly, sleepily. "Last night
" You were kind to me, she was going to say. Thank you.
The glare from his blue eyes stabbed through her. "There was no last night," he said through his teeth.
At that, she sat up straight, almost awake. "Oh, truly? We just went right from one afternoon on through till the next morning? How odd no one else remarked on it. I should think it some miracle, a day with no night
— Cassandra Clare

God, am I like the rest after all?" - So he used to think starting awake at night - "Am I like the rest? — F Scott Fitzgerald

The thing that keeps me awake at night is a nexus between terrorism and massive destruction ... the possibility that a terrorist organization could either acquire a ready-made weapon or fabricate something improvised that would have a catastrophic effect for us. — Michele Flournoy

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.
By the Universe deserted,
she'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well
into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me. — Elizabeth Bishop

And sometimes when I tilt my head,
in that deep sleep, I realize I forgot to tell you
what happened at work, in the thick of,
all other rubbish daily stuff.
And then I hate to believe, it's more than
5 hours to hit the snooze, and now suddenly
the night seems longer- than any lazy afternoon.
I want to talk to you now, before I forget
How I have imagined you will react, word by word,
And act by act.
But I kind of manage dozing off in a few minutes,
And I clearly forget it morning,
This entire instance.

But tonight- when you are asleep, and I am
Wide awake like a snake, I don't say I forgot any
Buzz to discuss, but I have this insane gush
Of words of tell you I how much I have loved you through.
Precisely none of this should be forgotten,
So I decide to write this poem and tell you,
I am so much in my moment of truth. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

Now that she was asked to speak at roundtables and panels, on public radio and community radio, always identified simply as The Blogger, she felt subsumed by her blog and had become her blog. There were times, lying awake at night, when her growing discomforts crawled out from the crevices, and the many readers became, in her mind, a judgmental angry mob waiting for her, biding their time until they could attack her, unmask her. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The insomnia I am talking about results from a mild state of possession, harmless to those around you, who sometimes even fail to notice it. It usually comes when you are completely engrossed in your work and overtakes you so completely that every aspect of your daily life becomes mechanical and provides only a colorless backdrop to action occurring only in your mind. It matters not whether at this time you are asleep or awake. The secret life pulses within you, and when you wake in the middle of the night you realize there is no way to stem its flow. — Lyudmila Ulitskaya

An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying good night, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone's passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realize that the loneliest you've ever been is within a marriage, as a wife. — Nikki Gemmell

This had been happening more and more often: the two of us come upon each other by accident in the early hours of the morning and take solace in each others' company, weathering out the peril of being awake at this time of night, when thoughts that are neatly ordered or justly murdered during the day come loose from their moorings and out of their graves, to tie themselves to each other in new and dangerous ways. — Dexter Palmer

There are lots of things that keep me awake at night, but work isn't one of them. I mean, no-one's going to die if someone doesn't like what I do. So I don't feel a great pressure. — Martin Freeman

When I was a child, I often used to lie awake at night, in fearful anticipation of some unpleasant event the following day, such as a visit to the dentist, and wish I could press some sort of button that would have the effect of instantly transporting me twenty-four hours into the future. The following night, I would wonder whether that magic button was in fact real, and that the trick had indeed worked. After all, it was twenty-four hours later, and though I could remember the visit to the dentist, it was, at that time, only a memory of an experience, not an experience. — Paul Davies