Insomniac Quotes & Sayings

As he reached for his Visa card, the security monitor next to the register caught Billy in all his glory: football burly but slump-shouldered, his pale face with its exhaustion-starred eyes topped with half a pitchfork's worth of prematurely graying hair. He was only forty-two, but that crushed-cellophane gaze of his combined with a world-class insomniac's posture had once gotten him into a movie at a senior citizen's discount. — Richard Price

A lifelong insomniac, I sleep like one newly dead every night and dream deeply harmonious dreams of swimming along with the current in a clear green river, playing and at home in the water. On the first night, I dreamed that the real name of the house was not Bramasole but Cento Angeli, One Hundred Angels, and that I would discover them one by one. Is it bad luck to change the name of a house, as it is to rename a boat? As a trepid foreigner, I wouldn't. But for me, the house now has a secret name as well as its own name. — Frances Mayes

Your gravity, your grace have turned a tide
In me, no lunar power can reverse;
But in your narcoleptic eyes I spied
A sightlessness tonight: or something worse,
A disregard that made me feel unmanned.
Meanwhile, insomniac, I catch my breath
To think I saw my future traced in sand
One afternoon "as still, as carved, as death,"
And pray for an oblivion so deep
It ends in transformation. Only dawn
Can save me, flood this haunted house of sleep
With light, and drown the thoughts that nightly warn:
Another lifetime is the least you'll need, to trace
The guarded secrets of her gravity, her grace. — Jonathan Coe

Sometimes in dreams there are visions of the past. For that reason Alice Prentice had always welcomed sleep, but she suffered an insomniac's dread of the time just before sleeping, the act of falling asleep itself, the perilous twilight of semi-awareness when the mind must struggle for coherence, when a siren or a cry in the street is the very sound of terror and the ticking of the clock is a steady reminder of death. — Richard Yates

Evelyn was an insomniac so when they say she died in her sleep, you have to question that. — Garrison Keillor

Because of my experience in Desert Storm I have permanent Insomnia but don't get me wrong I love sleep I can never get enough of it. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

Staring at the blue sky causes insomnia to occur in the human — Steven Magee

She married the prince
and all went well
except for the fear
the fear of sleep.
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

For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history. — Derek Walcott

Later, when his desires had been satisfied, he slept in an odorous whorehouse, snoring lustily next to an insomniac tart, and dreamed. He could dream in seven languages: Italian, Spanic, Arabic, Persian, Russian, English and Portughese. He had picked up languages the way most sailors picked up diseases; languages were his gonorrhea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague,his plague. As soon as he fell asleep half the world started babbling in his brain, telling wondrous travelers' tales. In this half-discovered world every day brought news of fresh enchantments. The visionary, revelatory dream-poetry of the quotidian had not yet been crushed by blinkered, prosy fact. Himself a teller of tales, he had been driven out of his door by stories of wonder, and by one in particular, a story which could make his fortune or else cost him his life. — Salman Rushdie

I'm just an insomniac struggling for a night where I don't dream of you anymore. — Lone Alaskan Gypsy

What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures? — Emil Cioran

Is I the insomniac's question?
Are you a dendrite or a dream?
Between oblivion and affection,
which one is fear and which protection? — Bruce Smith

I am an insomniac. — Josh Hartnett

Being an insomniac only slows me down. I try not to write at night, as I'm concerned that this will affect the quality. I might have a Scotch to keep me going, but I like to be as awake and as alert as possible. — Elliot Perlman

Paris is an insomniac's heaven. There is always something to photograph, something hidden in the shadows. One can see so much more in the darkness than in the light of day. — Francine Prose

I live in the middle of nowhere and I'm an insomniac. I just make the time and I read and write really fast so that makes a lot possible for me. I wish I had an explanation for it. I'm grateful for it. — Roxane Gay

It's funny because before I joined the cast of 'Heroes,' I was an insomniac. I have suffered from insomnia for, like, so long. Now that I'm on the show, seriously - I sleep like a baby. I'm so tired all the time. — Dana Davis

Hundreds of our old neighbors, friends, coworkers, and teachers are new insomniacs. They file for dream bankruptcy, appeal for Slumber Corps aid, wait to be approved for a sleep donor. It is a special kind of homelessness, says our mayor, to be evicted from your dreams. I believe our mayor is both genuinely concerned for his insomniac constituency, and also pandering to a powerfully desperate new voting block. — Karen Russell

In the American Grain"
"Ninth grade, and bicycling the Jersey highways:
I am a writer. I was half-wasp already,
I changed my shirt and trousers twice a day.
My poems came back ... often rejected, though never
forgotten in New York, this Jewish state
with insomniac minorities.
I am sick of the enlightenment:
what Wall Street prints, the mafia distributes;
when talent starves in a garret, they buy the garret.
Bill Williams made less than Band-Aids on his writing,
he could never write the King's English of The New Yorker.
I am not William Carlos Williams. He
knew the germ on every flower, and saw
the snake is a petty, rather pathetic creature. — Robert Lowell

My heart can feel the softness of a star
Only when the moon stays afar
I lay my mind on the pillow of sky
Where sleep dares not ever to pry — Munia Khan

Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?"
"I give."
"You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog. — David Foster Wallace

I'm an insomniac lately. It's one of the many prizes you find in the Cracker Jack box of a crumbling [relationship], — Kristin Hannah

In the middle of a long, quiet night I might give my mother a sharp kick. She'll wake, become insomniac, reach for the radio. Cruel sport, I know, but we are both better informed by the morning. — Ian McEwan

Insomniac is an impassioned work-an inspired amalgam of academic and first-hand research, memoir, analysis, and the kind of obsessive brooding we associate with the insomniac state. Much here is fascinating, and much is upsetting; here is a cri de coeur from a lifetime insomniac that is sure to appeal to the vast army of fellow insomniacs the world over. — Joyce Carol Oates

My attention span is all over the place, and I overthink things. I'm an insomniac. — Selena Gomez

My name is Sherman J. Alexie Jr., and I am an insomniac. — Sherman Alexie

Boy needs to get a good night's sleep. Otherwise, he'll be lucky to get accepted at SUNY-So Far Upstate You Might As Well Be In Canada, eh? — Rachel Cohn

I am an insomniac. Most of my nights include a moment of wakening. Often I will make my way to the kitchen to make tea and read for awhile. — Jacqueline Novogratz

I'm an insomniac. Ambien is my best friend. — Johnny Weir

Except he'd been wrong about that. There was a monster in the lake. It had grabbed Hassan by the ankles, dragged him to the murky bottom. I was that monster. That was the night I became an insomniac. — Khaled Hosseini

I read a lot of The Canterbury Tales on my phone, because I was cycling between three different editions, and I needed to have a middle-of-the-night edition for the insomniac reading. — Rick Moody

As a young wife and mother living in a pre-Pinterest world, I used to glue-gun bows and small pieces of minutia together methodically. I was an insomniac proudly penning thank you notes longer than the Declaration of Independence to every person who had even sent me a card. I was reorganizing my linen closet, ironing placemats, straight-ironing my hair, and never saying no to any person that asked me for a favor. And, I forgot to mention, I didn't really like myself.
I felt like a fuzzy, carbon copy of myself. I felt the passion, the conviction, and the grit somewhere inside of me yet a bunch of preconceived ideas somehow got in the way. — Ann Brasco

I'm an insomniac, my mind works the night shift. — Pete Wentz

Anything less than mad, passionate, extraordinary love is a waste of time. There are too many mediocre things in life to deal with and love shouldn't be one of them. — Tiffanie DeBartolo

With reference to the younger generation ... "If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn't mean they're lazy. It means they're sane." — Anna Quindlen

Only by recalling a dream is an insomniac sure he's slept. — Mo Yan

Stein resented the sedative power of religion, or rather the repose available to those blissfully ignorant that the medicament was a fictitious blank. In this exile from peace of mind to which his reason doomed him, he was like an insomniac driven to awaken sleepers from dreams illegitimately won by going around shouting, 'Don't you realize it was a placebo!' Thus it seemed to me that what you were up against in Stein was not logic rampant, but frustrated faith. He could not forgive God for not existing. — Peter De Vries

I stumbled into this format for 'Last Call with Carson Daly' that I really like, inspired by cable and Dave Attell's 'Insomniac.' I love being out on the street. — Carson Daly

What else could I be? If I were a mono-thinker, I probably wouldn't be an insomniac. How is a poly-thinker supposed to fall asleep, and more importantly, stay asleep, when thoughts just won't stop darting! darting! darting! through my head? — Rachel Cohn

The sound is gone. There's nothing left but the insomniac throbbing of crickets. Crickets in the garden, the courtyard, the back courtyard. Close, domestic, identifiable. And those out in the country. Between all of them they raise, little by little, a wall that will keep out the thing that lies waiting for the tiniest crack of silence to steal through. The thing that is feared by all those who are sleepless, those who walk through the night, those who are lonely, children. That thing. The voice of the dead. — Rosario Castellanos

Dr Urbino recognized their oppressive weight, their ominous silence, their suffocating gases, which on so many insomniac dawns had risen to his bedroom, blending with the fragrance of jasmine from the patio, and which he felt pass by him like a wind out of yesterday that had nothing to do with his life. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality. — Gilles Deleuze

I was quite an insomniac. I rarely slept as a child. Having God to talk to at night was nice. — Patti Smith

I'm a rather useless insomniac viscount, but" - he gestured at Minerva - "my companion here is a brilliant geologist. There's a symposium, you see. We need to get to Edinburgh by tomorrow, so she can present her findings about giant lizards and possibly alter our understanding of the world's natural history. — Tessa Dare

He was afraid of touching his own wrist. 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

Mia's mother, Nonna Celia, is to blame for that, because she's a prophet of doom. Every time I'd ask her if we could go someplace the next day or next week, her reply would be, "We might not live that long." If I'd say, "See you tomorrow," her answer would be, "If that's what God wants." Leaving so much to fate has kept me an insomniac for most of my life... — Melina Marchetta

I caught the smell of a warm woman and I saw the eyes of an insomniac leopard in the darkness ... — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Choices are like connecting highways. They all take you to the same place. Some just take longer to get there. — Ione Skye

O sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature's soft nurse, how have I frightened thee, 1710. That thou no more will weigh my eyelids down, And steep my senses in forgetfulness? — William Shakespeare

I don't sleep much. It takes me a long time to fall asleep. I'm a bit of an insomniac but, when I fall asleep, I don't ever want to wake up. — Enrique Iglesias

The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world. — Leonard Cohen

You're like a dream I never want to wake up from, but I; I'm insomniac! — Ahmed Mostafa

I'm an insomniac, so my perfect reader is probably another insomniac. — John Burnside

I was a very special child. I did stand-up comedy. I did it all. My family didn't understand. 'Aren't you tired?' I'm like, 'No.' I'm like an insomniac, I hardly sleep, I'm always on the move. — Alessandra Torresani

there's no way I can sleep in any position with so much still unwritten about the glory of basements, where,
with all the promise in crock pot boxes, small animals go to die, piles of laundry hide the machines, rusted tools fall into other rusted tools giving way to unsung sculpture, soiled playing cards and unmatched socks strewn atop a punched-out screen door make a shaggy parquet; and a famished, leggy fluorescent tube barely winks on the entire scene. — Kristen Henderson

I'm not an insomniac. It's just that my mind is in the best position to catch the weight of all hovering possibilities the moment I lie down. — Joyce Rachelle

I'm awake and I can't sleep. The more I'm awake, the more I see, and the harder to sleep. — Donna Lynn Hope

... praise any word that can hold you. Praise all but the vanishing point where we stand now, not quite parted. Already memories fall like blows. But soon they will be treasure, dropped like gold through a miser's fingers as he makes his accounts ... Praise each insomniac hour, kept wide awake by your glow. Sleep would only have robbed more coins from this vandal hoarded store. — Barbara Kingsolver

Difficulties with concentration are correlated with sleep impairment, especially insomnia, arising from hypervigilance. The insomniac person is always on alert, which increases his or her stress-hormone levels and heart rate, and turns on the sympathetic nervous system. One of the roles of histamine, released in response to stress, is to ensure that you're wide-awake. These processes make relaxation and sleep difficult. — Doreen Virtue

Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's
the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance
as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off. — Jonathan Lethem

As a seasoned insomniac, I knew sometimes the way to beat sleeplessness was to outwit it: to pretend you didn't care about sleeping. Then sometimes sleep became piqued, like a rejected lover, and crept up to try to seduce you. — Erica Jong

Only the insomniac looks on with open eyes, like a cadaver who forgot to die. — Gyula Krudy

Henry's also an insomniac. He suffers from Restless Leg Syndrome. I feel the sheets twitching as his legs move restlessly and think about how incredibly bourgeois we are, with our Sur La Table kitchenware, our Sundance catalogue lamps, our upper-middle class insomnia. Why can't we sleep, I wonder? We have enough to eat, we have a roof over our heads, we're not living in a mud hut sporting a thatch of gnarled leaves that barely cover our genitalia. I'm filled with self-loathing. — Shannon Bradley-Colleary

Loving my Poet as I do, though, I try hard to understand what a poet is. The first clue lies in the fact that my Poet - every poet - is an insomniac. My own reads or wanders about our apartment for the best part of most nights. She told me she often feels she would give up every poem she's ever written for one good night's sleep. — Naeem Murr

I became an insomniac, really, hardly slept at all, didn't even try to. And it's carried on. I hate to say I only need as much sleep as Mrs. Thatcher, but I can cope really well on five hours. — Sue Townsend

I'm an insomniac - the affliction of champions. — Emma Chase

I'm a bit of an insomniac. I'm always thinking. I've got a lot of ideas for lyrics and shows. I have a notepad by the side of the bed and voice recorders around the house. — Kid Rock

I either eat too much or starve myself. Sleep for 14 hours or have insomniac nights. Fall in love very hard or hate passionately. I don't know what grey is. I never did. — Anais Nin

I'm a bit of an insomniac. I go to bed at 5am because I get caught up in watching TV or listening to music at night. — A. J. McLean

Sometimes, at the least opportune times, the past is an insomniac, alive and well. — Courtney Cole

When you're the sane brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your hands
the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper
if you've promised your dying mother
then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the indifference of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin
the guy who beat the biochemical rap. — Wally Lamb

That small freckle postulates a grin on my face:
see to it that midnight reeks insomniac on your eyes;
I turn the pillow upside down to not smell my breath again
Is there, aside from my memory, for you a better place? — Ashfaq Saraf

The hollows around her eyes were darkly glamorous, her mouth sullen: she had the beauty of an insomniac. — Jardine Libaire

I can't be the only insomniac who has looked out his living room window and thought, "Why don't we all get together? We're awake. We could swap sleep recipes, console each other, plot terrible crimes." But it won't happen, any gathering of the near-dead, because the only thing more abhorrent to a restless mind in the ugly hours than the actual harshness of the ugly hours is the thought of having to listen to somebody else. Somebody else in distress, also angry at the comfortable world. — RM Vaughan

You're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself. — Joyce Carol Oates

My work has to do with a defense against fervor. People are always in a rush. To do what? To do nothing! There is a kind of fervor that is completely meaningless. This drawing is a call for meditation ... I am an insomniac, so for me the state of being asleep is paradise. It is a paradise I can never reach. But I still try to conquer the insomnia, and to a large extent I have done it; it is conquerable. My drawings are a kind of rocking or stroking and an attempt at finding peace. Peaceful rhythm. Like rocking a baby to sleep. — Louise Bourgeois

Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence. — Alberto Manguel

I'm kind of an insomniac and watch TV late at night. — Monica Keena