Sleep Insomnia Quotes & Sayings

Tonight - I am alone in the night,
a homeless and sleepless nun!
Tonight I hold all the keys to this
the only capital city
and lack of sleep guides me on my path.
You are so lovely, my dusky Kremlin!
Tonight I put my lips to the breast
of the whole round and warring earth.
Now I feel hair - like fur - standing on end:
the stifling winds blow straight into my soul.
Tonight I feel compassion for everyone,
those who are pitied, along with those who are kissed. — Marina Tsvetaeva

Insomnia is only mind over mattress. — Jane Ace

THE OTHER DAY I HAD INSOMNIA AND I MADE MY CATS A WATER BED OUT OF A ZIPLOC BAG AND A SHOEBOX. THEY POPPED IT WITH THEIR CLAWS AND THEY ALMOST DROWNED. THEN I TRIED TO PUT BABY SOCKS AROUND THEIR FEET BUT THEY KEPT PULLING THEM OFF SO I TRIED WRAPPING RUBBER BANDS AROUND THE SOCK HEMS AND THEN MY HUSBAND WOKE UP WHILE I WAS PINNING ONE OF THE CATS DOWN TO PUT THE SOCK ON HIM AND HE WAS ALL, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHY ARE THESE CATS ALL WET?" AND I WAS LIKE, "I'M TRYING TO HELP THEM ENJOY WATER BEDS," AND THEN VICTOR MADE ME GO TO SLEEP. IT WAS A DISAPPOINTMENT TO EVERYONE INVOLVED. — Jenny Lawson

When it becomes really impossible to get away and sleep, then the will to live evaporates of its own accord. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The artist (I suppose) usually pays for the privilege by some sort of partial insomnia, by the possession of one faculty that will not be controlled nor put to sleep. In a poet this must often be the visual imagination, bringing before his eyes a succession of images which he never summoned, and of which some (it is only too likely) will be ugly or pitiful. — Mary Lascelles

Bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret. — Charles Caleb Colton

Some thoughts are too angry to sleep. They lie awake all night and become obsessions. — Marty Rubin

The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to. — F Scott Fitzgerald

No amount of sleep will ever satisfy the tiredness i always feel. — Unknown

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

I've crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I've come to a place I never thought I'd have to come to. And I don't know how I got here. It's a strange place. It's a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation. — Raymond Carver

I was proud of working 18 hours a day and sleeping three hours a night. It's something now that has turned into a problem for me: not being able to sleep ... having insomnia. — Sean Combs

So, sleep deprivation, and sometimes an insomnia, which is a little bit of a different form, but just getting a lack of sleep, can lead to a number of different decrements. — Shelby Harris

Insomnia is an increasing problem. I've become swayed that sleep disorders are conceivably the most unnoticed, ignored, underrated reason of health as well as performance problems in the place of work. — Sean Sullivan

You lack the season of all natures, sleep. — William Shakespeare

The kingdom of sleep demands its forfeits, and the world looks very different through eyes cracked and yellow with its denial. — Alaya Dawn Johnson

I can't sleep. I haven't slept in days. I hate this, hate insomnia more than anything, just lying there, brain going round, tick, tick, tick, tick. I itch all over. I want to shave my head. — Paula Hawkins

We've looked at sleep diaries of patients with insomnia, and they'll say that they don't sleep for one or two days. And the body actually has a natural function, after about the third day to start catching up and you get a little bit more sleep the third night. And that's usually what I tell my patients. — Shelby Harris

I'm so tired. Sleep's been stalking me for too long to remember. Inevitable I suppose. — Mark Z. Danielewski

While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia. — Evgeny Morozov

Sleep deprivation is physically miserable and creatively cathartic, as internal landscapes rise up from their dormant ashes. — Jaeda DeWalt

The monsters were never
under my bed.
Because the monsters
were inside my head.


I fear no monsters,
for no monsters I see.
Because all this time
the monster has been me. — Nikita Gill

And that night he couldn't sleep, but lay looking out at the light June night which was full of lonely whisperings and rustlings and the pattering of feet. The air was sweet with the smell of flowers. — Tove Jansson

Another intruder that plagues our good health is sleeplessness. Insomnia is much like constipation in that stress or nervous tension can bring it on or aggravate it until there's almost no coping with it. That's why you find sleeping pills in so many medicine cabinets next to the laxatives. — Jack LaLanne

The rain is, in a sense,
The sole sad friend of those who find themselves
Thinking, wide awake, until the dawn,
Who, in bed, alone, with fevered hands,
Listen to it, soothed. They like the company
Of its faint moan across the sleeping plain,
Its rustling in the garden all night long.

- On the Great Grey Road (Sur ce Grand Chemin Gris...) — Alain-Fournier

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

His impatience for sleep often frightened that very sleep away. — Hugh Howey

A 2002 Oxford study showed counting sheep actually delays the onset of sleep. It's just too dull to stop us from worrying about jobs and spouses — A. J. Jacobs

Sleep: a poor substitute for caffeine! — Wallace Shawn

He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it. — Ernest Hemingway,

A man who, night after night, falls like a lump of lead upon his bed, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will such a man ever dream of making, I do not say great discoveries, but even minute observations upon sleep? He barely knows that he does sleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. A memory without fault is not a very powerful incentive to studying the phenomena of memory. — Marcel Proust

A fickle lover, sleep takes us as it will, when it wants, and how. Sensing her desperate need, however, it draws Corrie deeply into its embrace, somewhere between her tears and terror. — Kimberly Morgan

Every morning I tell myself, "I'll sleep early tonight." And every night I say, "One more chapter. — Joyce Rachelle

People who are contented and serene sleep well. They fall asleep easily, stay asleep, and wake refreshed. Conversely, people who are anxious, stressed, or depressed do not sleep well, and chronic insomnia is strongly associated with mood disorders. These are clear correlations, but what is cause and what is effect is not clear. Most experts agree that sleep and mood are closely related, that healthy sleep can enhance emotional well-being, while insufficient quantity or quality of sleep can adversely affect it. — Andrew Weil

Insomnia is the act of pushing through sleep to achieve the art of insane creativity. — Todd Stocker

His insomnia was so bad, he couldn't sleep during office hours. — Arthur Baer

Overhead, the glass envelope of the Insomnia Balloon is malfunctioning. It blinks on and off at arrhythmic intervals, making the world go gray:black, gray:black. In the distance, a knot of twisted trees flashes like cerebral circuitry. — Karen Russell

I only sleep with people I love, which is why I have insomnia. — Emilie Autumn

I tried and tried to sleep, lulled by the movement, the purring of the motor, and the snores of the other passengers, but it's never been easy for me to sleep, and much less now, when I still have residues of the wild life running through my veins. — Isabel Allende

Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love- you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you're over. You've caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night. The city, of course, can wreck it. So much insomnia. So many rhythms collide. The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know. — Renata Adler

When I can't sleep I count the buckles on my straightjacket. — Cathie Linz

The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at ever conscious moment its victim - even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon - feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbours soundly sleep. — Michael Chabon

It was impossible to sleep. Anxiety stopped me from falling asleep; depression woke me up. — David Walliams

Insomnia never comes to a man who has to get up exactly at six o'clock. Insomnia troubles only those who can sleep any time. — Elbert Hubbard

The truth is there isn't anything to me at all. All I know is that I can't sleep well, I can't dream well and I'm quite in love with you. That's all there is to me. My greatest feature is my admiration for you. I know it's not healthy. Like my insomnia. Like my dreamless nights. You make living alright. My nightmares come when I think of a night without Valeria. That's when I realise you're dead. That's when I remember you've been gone for years. That's when I remember I'm awake. And I wait for this dream called Life to leave me to my peace once and for all and forever. — F.K. Preston

Don't fight with the pillow, but lay down your head And kick every worriment out of the bed. — Edmund Vance Cooke

I won't sleep
if that's what it takes
to not wake up
as myself — Casey Renee Kiser

How do people go to sleep? I'm afraid I've lost the knack. — Dorothy Parker

So if somebody has chronic pain, we want to manage the pain, but we still want to treat the insomnia separately. So what we'll tend to do in our sleep lab is we'll do a thorough evaluation and we usually have myself, who is a Psychologist and a Sleep Behavioral Sleep Specialist, I treat the patients first. — Shelby Harris

In general, there are patients with insomnia who - many patients with insomnia will actually over report the lack of sleep that they are getting. — Shelby Harris

Both sleep and insomnolency, when immoderate, are bad. — Hippocrates

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

Sleep, rest of things, O pleasing Deity, Peace of the soul, which cares dost crucify, Weary bodies refresh and mollify. — Ovid

A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. — Marcel Proust

When I want to go to sleep, I must first get a whole menagerie of voices to shut up. You wouldn't believe what a racket they make in my room. — Karl Kraus

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

Why can I never go back to bed? Who's is the voice ringing in my head? Where is the sense in these desperate dreams? Why should I wake when I'm half past dead? — Emilie Autumn

I've had insomnia since I was five years old. I just don't require much sleep. I'm never tired. — Nile Rodgers

People who sleep only two or three hours in the twenty-four are always geniuses. The ones you hear about, anyway. Never mind if the ones you don't hear about are dolts. Insomnia is genius. It must be. Think of all the work you could do the thoughts you could think, the books you could read, the love you could make, while the dull clods lie snoring. — Ursula K. Le Guin

It appears that every man's insomnia is as different from his neighbours as are their daytime hopes and aspirations. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Come Sleep! Oh Sleep, the certain knot of peace, the baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe, the poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release, the indifferent judge between the high and low. — Philip Sidney

Persons in whom a crisis takes place pass the night preceding the paroxysm uncomfortably, but the succeeding night generally more comfortably. — Hippocrates

Three weeks and I hadn't slept. Three weeks without sleep, and everything becomes an out-of-body-experience. My doctor said, "Insomnia is just the symptom of something larger. Find out what's actually wrong. Listen to your body."
I just wanted to sleep. I wanted little blue Amytal Sodium capsules, 200-milligram-sized. I wanted red-and-blue Tuinal bullet capsules, lipstick-red Seconal. — Chuck Palahniuk

Those who live with insomnia and who consider sleep both an enemy and a gift will understand the following. Some of us cannot comprehend how anyone except the very good or those who have no conscience at all can sleep from dark to dawn without dreaming or waking. We hear William Blake's tiger padding softly through a green jungle, his stripes glowing, his whiskers spotted with gore. Psychoanalysis does no good. Neither does a health regimen that induces physical exhaustion. The only solution that is guaranteed is the one provided by our old friend Morpheus, who requires our souls in the bargain. — James Lee Burke

There is nowhere in the world where sleep is so deep as in the libraries of the House of Commons. — Henry Channon

On some nights, he has nowhere to sleep, on others, he suffers from insomnia. "That's just how it is," thinks the Warrior. "I was the one who chose to walk this path. — Paulo Coelho

Try staying awake for 24 hours and you'll realize just how many needless worries your mind instantly shuts out. — Joyce Rachelle

A three-year-old with insomnia is very similar to a heroin addict going through withdrawal. There is nothing that calms them. They can't focus. You can't tell them enough stories. They don't understand why they are still awake four hours past their bedtime. This is commonly understood by all parents of three-year-olds and has inspired great works of literature, such as Go the F-ck to Sleep. — Jim Gaffigan

I thought calming thoughts and visualized serene places. Eventually, i found myself drifting along the frenetic edges of my mind. The Sandman was nowhere to be found, as i slipped further away from sleep. — Jaeda DeWalt

I'm so exhausted and yet I feel like I'll never sleep again. — Maya Banks

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

For six months I couldn't sleep. With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. — Chuck Palahniuk

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

I have lost my rhythm.
I can't sleep.
I can't eat.
I have been robbed of
my filth. — Charles Bukowski

Am I sleeping? Have I slept at all? This is insomnia. — Chuck Palahniuk

Waldo, I say-that is-aren't you tired, my boy?" Professor Buckley, suppressing a yawn, was unaccustomed to others matching his wakefulness wink for wink, as it were, and seemed jealous of the competition Waldo presented in that regard.
"Who can sleep?" Waldo replied. "We're on another of these crazy roads, we can't find the interstate...."
"Yes, I suppose you're right." The Professor interrupted, taking off his thick spectacles and polishing them on his bright tie. "I, on the other hand, never sleep, as I'm sure you're aware."
Waldo smiled. The Professor had little in life to be vain about, and he wasn't going to stop him from expressing a little pride now and then. — Donald Jeffries

The amount of sleep required by the average person is five minutes more. — Wilson Mizner

Sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest — Gaston Bachelard

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

Insomnia is a very prevalent issue. It's a women's health issue, and I chose to talk about it because so many people have experienced it to varying degrees. For me, I'm doing great now, but it took a lot of work to figure out how to get back to sleep. I had to change some of my habits. I developed some pretty bad sleep ritual habits. — Jenny Lewis

...philosophy permits man to interrogate himself about what he says and about what one says to oneself in thinking. No longer to let oneself be swayed or intoxicated by the rhythm of words and the generality that they designate, but to open oneself to the uniqueness of the unique in the real, that is to say, to the uniqueness of the other. That is to say, in the final analysis, to love. To speak truly, not as one sings; to awaken; to sober up; to undo one's refrain. Already the philosopher Alain taught us to be on guard against everything that in our purportedly lucid civilization comes to us from the "merchants of sleep." Philosophy as insomnia, as a new awakening at the heart of the self-evidence which already marks the awakening, but which is still or always a dream. — Emmanue Levinas

When Kafka allows a friend to understand that he writes because otherwise he would go mad, he knows that writing is madness already, his madness, a kind of vigilence, unrelated to any wakefulness save sleep's: insomnia. Madness against madness, then. But he believes that he masters the one by abandoning himself to it; the other frightens him, and is his fear; it tears through him, wounds and exalts him. It is as if he had to undergo all the force of an uninterruptable continuity, a tension at the edge of the insupportable which he speaks of with fear and not without a feeling of glory. For glory is the disaster. — Maurice Blanchot

In the absence of sleep, my restless nights have been fueled by my overactive imagination, weaving waking dreams onto the canvas of conception. Filling my head with lots of ideas waiting to be born into reality. I am eager to return to my beautiful mistress, Creation! — Jaeda DeWalt

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

When I feel well and in a good humour, or when I am taking a drive or walking after a good meal, or in the night when I cannot sleep, thoughts crowd into my mind as easily as you could wish. — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets. — Poppy Z. Brite

I felt very bad and could not sleep until 1am. Maybe he could coach me defence. — Tamim Iqbal

I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. — David Benioff

What delicious abandon in the sleep of the child. Where do we lose it? — Frank Herbert

I haven't been to sleep for over a year. That's why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn't sleep. — Evelyn Waugh

I think insomnia is a sign that a person is interesting. — Avery Sawyer

When they [people with insomnia] start worrying about not sleeping, I'll say, "Say the mantra to myself; if I don't sleep tonight, I'll likely sleep tomorrow, and if not tomorrow then definitely the third" because our body has a way of naturally catching up. — Shelby Harris

We term sleep a death by which we may be literally said to die daily; in fine, so like death, I dare not trust it without my prayers. — Thomas Browne

That gap between half sleep and half awakening has always been occupied by nostalgia. — Shreya Gupta

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

Infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyse mechanisms of which otherwise we should know nothing. A man who falls straight into bed night after night, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, I don't say great discoveries, but even minor observations about sleep. He scarcely knows that he is asleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. An unfailing memory is not a very powerful incentive to the study of the phenomena of memory. — Marcel Proust

But [Pooh] couldn't sleep. The more he tried to sleep the more he couldn't. He tried counting Sheep, which is sometimes a good way of getting to sleep, and, as that was no good, he tried counting Heffalumps. And that was worse. Because every Heffalump that he counted was making straight for a pot of Pooh's honey, and eating it all. For some minutes he lay there miserably, but when the five hundred and eighty-seventh Heffalump was licking its jaws, and saying to itself, "Very good honey this, I don't know when I've tasted better," Pooh could bear it no longer. — A.A. Milne

Insomnia
I cannot get to sleep tonight.
I toss and turn and flop.
I try to count some fluffy sheep
while o'er a fence they hop.
I try to think of pleasant dreams
of places really cool.
I don't know why I cannot sleep -
I slept just fine at school. — Kathy Kenney-Marshall