Quotes & Sayings About Sleeplessness

Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears ... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness and acts that are contrary to habit ... — Hippocrates

Watch over your child, as it struggles for breath on the outermost verge of life, or see your wife follow the child to that outermost verge, beside herself for anxiety and sleeplessness, - then love will teach you that life comes first. — Bjornstjerne Bjornson

Very often, gleams of light come in a few minutes' sleeplessness, in a second
perhaps; you must fix them. To entrust them to the relaxed brain is like writing on water; there is every chance that on the morrow there will be no slightest trace left of any happening. — Antonin Sertillanges

Sleeplessness and being a writer seem to go together hand in hand. — Jason E. Hodges

MOMBIE - noun - Suffers from forgetfulness, fatigue, exhaustion, moodiness, sleeplessness, confusion and moments of insanity!
Has difficulty eating or drinking anything while it's still hot and peeing alone. — Tanya Masse

Jasmine

"Almost the twenty-first century" --
how quickly the thought will grow dated,
even quaint.

Our hopes, our future,
will pass like the hopes and futures of others.

And all our anxieties and terrors,
nights of sleeplessness,
griefs,
will appear then as they truly are --

Stumbling, delirious bees in the tea scent of jasmine. — Jane Hirshfield

It was not, she said, confessing to her husband her sleeplessness, that she was afraid. She was only "keepin' them company, an' haudin' the yett open," she said. The latter phrase was her picture-periphrase for praying. She never said she prayed; she held the gate open. — George MacDonald

Sleep is such a luxury, which i cant afford. — Robin Sikarwar

Twenty-fours hours of sleeplessness had made her, in my eyes, anyway, and idealized representation of compassionate, long-suffering women of all ages everywhere. — Kurt Vonnegut

She'd looked at herself with a sigh, having hoped her reflection would show something more than the road-weary waif who sighed back at her, bright curls disheveled and darkened by dust, pale eyes reddened and circled by shadows of sleeplessness. — Susanna Kearsley

And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time. — Ray Bradbury

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

Coffee and makeup would reach its limit and no longer work in hiding my sleeplessness. — Mandy Nachampassack-Maloney

It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness, — Thomas Hardy

Oh love, rose made wet by mermaids and foams, fire that dances and climbs up the invisible stairs and awakens the blood in the tunnel of sleeplessness. — Pablo Neruda

Human love is emotional. Feelings dominate a human's love landscape. We feel as though we're in love, or we don't feel as though we're in love. Hormones, sleeplessness, wory, past hurts, Mexican food
all complicate these emotions. — Max Lucado

For there is nothing quite so terror-inducing as the loss of sleep. It creates phantoms and doubts, causes one to questions one's own abilities and judgement, and, over time, dismantles, from within, the body. — Charlie Huston

Every torment they had experienced was returned to them an intoxication. It seemed to them that the griefs , the sleeplessness, the tears, the anguish, the dismay, the despair, became caresses and radiance ... and that their sorrows were so many servants preparing their joy. To have suffered, how good it is! Their grief made a halo around their happiness. — Victor Hugo

Twitter, checking in on the world, and I see a tweet from some motherhood site. It says: "Sleeplessness is a badge of honor for moms." What? A badge of honor? Right then and there, my hair catches — Shonda Rhimes

I began to experience, over the course of the next three months, full-blown insomnia. I'm not talking about the romantic kind, not the sweet sleeplessness one has when one is in love, anxiously awaiting the morn so one can rendezvous with a lover in an illicit gazebo. No, this was the torturous, clammy kind, when one's pillow slowly takes on the properties of a block of wood and one's sheets, the air of the Everglades. — Marisha Pessl

Isn't this a nice time of night to walk? I like to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise. — Ray Bradbury

I feel as though whenever I create something, my Mr. Hyde wakes up in the middle of the night and starts thrashing it. I sometimes love it the next morning, but other times it is an abomination. — Criss Jami

Dark circles under my eyes sink deeper and deeper into my skull, in contrast to my pale skin there is an undeniable resemblance to a fresh corpse. — Dee Remy

In troubled times, one wishes for a sound sleep more than usual, but on the contrary, realizing its amplified importance, sleep smugly impedes all attempts to woo it. — Pawan Mishra

It is false to believe that the scale of fears corresponds to that of the dangers which inspire them. One might be frightened of sleeplessness and yet not of a duel, of a rat and not of a lion. — Marcel Proust

Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth. — Emil Cioran

A broken heart in real life isn't half as dreadful as it is in books. It's a good deal like a bad tooth, though you won't think THAT a very romantic simile. It takes spells of aching and gives you a sleepless night now and then, but between times it lets you enjoy life and dreams and echoes and peanut candy as if there were nothing the matter with it. — L.M. Montgomery

Emotionally, grief is a mixture of raw feelings such as sorrow, anguish, anger, regret, longing, fear, and deprivation. Grief may be experienced physically as exhaustion, emptiness, tension, sleeplessness, or loss of appetite. — Judy Tatelbaum

It is at night when sleep like the outgoing sea leaves you dry and cold and the morning light arrives like a small punishment. — Chloe Thurlow

Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Think what devils chase a man who cannot sleep in his own house. — Warren Eyster

The last thing she remembered before finally drifting off was how nice Steffi's hair smelled. — Kim Baldwin

The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release. — Emil Cioran

I haven't been out driving at this time of night in many years, much less in an unfamiliar area. These are the things that scare you as you get older. You understand night all too well, all its attendant meanings. You try to avoid it, work around it, keep it from entering your house. Your weary, ornery body tells you to stay up late, sleep less, keep the lights on, don't go into the bedroom - if you have to sleep, sleep in your chair, at the table. Everything is about avoiding the night. Because of that, I suppose that I should be scared out here in the dark, but I am finally past that, I think.
(p.204) — Michael Zadoorian

Skepticism turns to cynicism, which leads to apathy and despair, which can cause sleeplessness, dry-mouth, and loss of sex drive. — Al Franken

Ibn Mas'ud said, "When 'Umar died nine-tenth of all knowledge vanished with him." The people were shocked and said, "How can this be when among us now are still many of the great companions?" Ibn Mas'ud replied,"I am not speaking of the knowledge of fiqh and the science of judgements, I'm speaking about the knowledge of Allah." This struggle of isolation, hunger, sleeplessness, weeping, fear and endless service to men was for this end. The journey is only for knowledge of Allah and the whole of it lies in detachment from everything that passes away. First from what is displeasing to Allah, then from one's self-illusion and desires, and then from all men and all otherness until there is only isolation and extreme nearness to Allah. — Khalid Muhammad Khalid

Can you sleep-deprive your way out of a depressed episode? Some researchers think that it may be possible. Using a technique called TSD (total sleep deprivation), researchers subjected depressed bipolar patients to three cycles of sleep deprivation, each consisting of a 36-hour period of sleeplessness followed by a 12-hour sleep-in. After the sessions, over half the participants reported feeling less depressed. The trouble is, TSD runs about a 10 percent risk of kicking a bipolar sufferer into hypomania or mania - about the same rate as SSRI antidepressants. In addition, the positive effects of TSD generally wear off as soon as you return to your normal sleep/wake cycle. Researchers continue to study the potential benefits of TSD when used in combination with other therapies, but the only solid conclusion that researchers have reached is that TSD is definitely not something you should try on your own. — Candida Fink

With regard to sleep and waking, we must consider what they are: whether they are peculiar to soul or to body, or common to both; and if common, to what part of soul or body the appertain: further, from what cause it arises that they are atributes of animals, and whether all animals share in them both, or some partake of the one only, others of the other only, or some partake of neither and some of both. — Aristotle.

Sometimes I have trouble falling asleep but it's not so bad
I don't worry and I don't weep. In fact I'm glad.
Because I get up off my pillow and I flip on the light.
I get down and get hip in the still of the night I stretch and I yawn and then I breathe real deep And dance myself to sleep.
I hoof around my beddie just a-tappin' my toes
Before I know what's happened I'm a-ready to doze
Got some partners I can count the boogie-woogie sheep
I dance myself to sleep. — Jim Henson

As he lay there, he was sure that he could still feel the memory of that strange hand cupping the back of his neck; and he couldn't believe how empty his mouth felt, now that it only had his own tongue in it. — Neil Bartlett

He points out that mystics have always worked systematically to modify their brain chemistry, whether through fasting, self-flagellation, sleeplessness, hypnotic movement, or chanting.* The brain can be made to drug itself, as seems to happen with certain placebos. We don't merely imagine that the placebo antidepressant is working to lift our sadness or worry - the brain is actually producing extra serotonin in response to the mental prompt of swallowing a pill containing nothing but sugar and belief. What all this suggests is that the workings of consciousness are both more and less materialistic than we usually think: chemical reactions can induce thoughts, but thoughts can also induce chemical reactions. — Michael Pollan

Why is it that all the main work of breaking down human souls went on at night? Why, from their very earliest years, did the Organs select the night? Because at night, the prisoner torn from sleep, even though he has not yet been tortured by sleeplessness, lacks his normal daytime equanimity and common sense. He is more vulnerable. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

I distinctly remember being a fifth-grader and lying in bed at three a.m. thinking, I am the only kid awake in the world. The insomnia feeds the anxiety, the anxiety feeds the insomnia, and my night would become a human centipede of sleeplessness. — Mamrie Hart

I am gay on the outside, especially among my own folk (I count Poles my own); but inside something gnaws at me; some presentiment, anxiety, dreams - or sleeplessness - melancholy, indifference - desire for life, and the next instant, desire for death; some kind of sweet peace, some kind of numbness, absent-mindedness ... — Frederic Chopin

It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one's own body ... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth. — George Orwell

And now I may dismiss my heroine to the sleepless couch, which is the true heroine's portion - to a pillow strewed with thorns and wet with tears. And lucky may she think herself, if she get another good night's rest in the course of the next three months. — Jane Austen

Don't buy society's definition of success. Because it's not working for anyone. It's not working for women, it's not working for men, it's not working for polar bears, it's not working for the cicadas that are apparently about to emerge and swarm us. It's only truly working for those who make pharmaceuticals for stress, diabetes, heart disease, sleeplessness, and high blood pressure. — Arianna Huffington

Dr. Holmes came again. Large, fresh coloured, handsome, flicking his boots, looking in the glass, he brushed it all aside-headaches, sleeplessness, fears, dreams-nerve symptoms and nothing more, he said. — Virginia Woolf

Oh, the terrible struggle that I have had against sleep so often of late; the pain of the sleeplessness, or the pain of the fear of sleep, and with such unknown horror as it has for me! How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams. — Bram Stoker

Far in the back of her mind she was thinking. But she could not dredge up these half-formed feelings, these obscure bits of ideas, into clear, definite thoughts ... Her mind ticked away, singing a song she could not decipher. — Helen Wells

A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say. — Jenny Offill

When you've been hurt enough as a kid (maybe at any age), it's like you have a trick knee. Most of your life, you can function like an adult, but add in the right portions of sleeplessness and stress and grief, and the hurt, defeated self can bloom into place. — Mary Karr

It's sad to fall asleep. It separates people. Even when you're sleeping together, you're all alone. — J.L. Merrow

They met in the library searching for old Sidney Sheldon books. Her silence and calmness drew her to him. His brooding nature drew him to her. Conversations flowed like the waters of a water-fall! And every time they met their conversations sparked flames like the forest caught in a wild fire!

There was something in her eyes! Her eyes were expressive and from the first day that they met, they spoke to him a million things! He could know which night she had cried, which night she had slept peacefully and which night of hers had been spent in complete sleeplessness. He began reading her eyes more deeply and passionately than the books in the library...

And being an obsessive man, he did things normal men did not! Like he knew the number of strands of hair that her eye-lashes had! — Avijeet Das

Care keeps his watch in every old man's eye,
And where care lodges, sleep will never lie. — William Shakespeare

She lay down and never stirred. To move hand or foot, or even so much as one finger, would have been an exertion beyond the powers of either volition or motion. She was so tired, so stunned, that she thought she never slept at all; her feverish thoughts passed and repassed the boundary between sleeping and waking, and kept their own miserable identity. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Bedtime is fraught with fear and disappointment. When it is just me alone with my restless body and mind, I feel like the whole world is asleep and gone. It's very lonely. I am tired of being tired and talking about how tired I am. — Amy Poehler

His persistence allowed us to play a game, and pretend that everything can stay as it is now forever. It cannot. The events of this day have shown us what happens when you try to keep things from changing. Sooner or later the sleeplessness catches up with you, the paranoia about threats devours you and your mind betrays you even if your body does not. — Frances Hardinge

Sometimes i only sleep to wake up — Saahil Prem

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

If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is! — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Today's competitiveness, so much imposed from without, is exhausting, not exhilarating; is unending-a part of one's social life, one's solitude, one's sleep, one's sleeplessness. — Louis Kronenberger

Parker Haas, crying Omaha, and his sleepless Rose. — Charlie Huston

Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants. — Jessamyn West

For the rest, she grew used to the life that she was leading - used to the enormous sleepless nights, the cold, the dirt, the boredom, and the horrible communism of the Square. After a day or two she had ceased to feel even a flicker of surprise at her situation. She had come, like everyone about her, to accept this monstrous existence almost as though it were normal. The dazed, witless feeling that she had known on the way to the hopfields had come back upon her more strongly than before. It is the common effect of sleeplessness and still more of exposure. To live continuously in the open air, never going under a roof for more than an hour or two, blurs your perceptions like a strong light glaring in your eyes or a noise drumming in your ears. You act and plan and suffer, and yet all the while it is as though everything were a little out of focus, a little unreal. The world, inner and outer, grows dimmer till it reaches almost the vagueness of a dream. — George Orwell

The cold, and even the hunger, the watchings and sleeplessness of nights of danger, and the feeling at times of utter isolation and helplessness, were well and wisely chosen, and tenderly and lovingly meted out. What circumstances could have rendered the Word of God more sweet, the presence of God more real, the help of God more precious? — Hudson Taylor

Something amazing happens when the rest of the world is sleeping. I am glued to my chair. I forget that I ever wanted to do anything but write. The crowded city, the crowded apartment, and the crowded calendar suddenly seem spacious. Three or four hours pass in a moment; I have no idea what time it is, because I never check the clock. If I chose to listen, I could hear the swish of taxis bound for downtown bars or the soft saxophone riffs that drift from a neighbor's window, but nothing gets through. I am suspended in a sensory deprivation tank, and the very lack of sensation is delicious. — Anne Fadiman

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

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,

The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know. — Patrick DeWitt

What a thing this sleeplessness was!...If sleep, she thought, could be compared to a gentle lake ina dark place, the sleeplessness was a roaring ocean, a raging, wind-buffeted voyage, lit with mad rocket-lights, pursued by wild phantoms from behind, plunging upon fearful rocks ahead, a mad tempest of the past and present and future all in one. Through all this the pale, strenuous mariner must somehow steer a way, until at last the weary dawn, not of sleep, but of resignation to sleeplessness, comes to calm the waters of the mind. — Patrick Hamilton

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

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

After counting all the sheep in the world
I enumerate the wildebeests, snails,
camels, skylarks, etc.,
then I add up all the zoos and aquariums,
country by country.
By early light I am asleep
in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood, — Billy Collins

Hail O mighty, fathomless sleep, come on and hug me tight and sweet;
when I whisper those deepest pains, onto your ears mute and keen,
sing for me the sweetest song that would sound the profoundest of life!
Leave me upon your rocking arms, watched by spirits of placid nights!

Goodnight, world, sweet dreams folks, blessed are those who would sleep at peace! — Preeth Nambiar

Do you think too long a period of nightlessness," mused Sandra, "could drive you insane, the way they say sleeplessness can? — Julia Glass