Quotes & Sayings About Wide Awake

Those little people, my brownies, who do one half of my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do for myself. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Wake Up Winners are wide awake; they are alive. Every day you will find them in the marketplace making things happen. The real winners are not just dreamers. Although they have dreams, they are doers: They realize their dreams. They are the bell ringers, always attempting to wake others up to the numerous opportunities life offers. If — Bob Proctor

I spent the rest of my day picturing how I'd kill Amy. It was all I could think of: finding a way to end her. Me smashing in Amy's busy, busy brain. I had to give Amy her due: I may have been dozing the past few years, but I was fucking wide awake now. I was electric again, like I had been in the early days of our marriage...
Andie had screwed me over, Marybeth had turned against me, Go had lost a crucial measure of faith. Boney had trapped me. Amy had destroyed me. I poured a drink. I took a slug, tightened my fingers around the curves of the tumbler, then hurled it at the wall, watched the glass burst into fireworks, heard the tremendous shatter, smelled the cloud of bourbon. Rage in all five senses. Those fucking bitches. — Gillian Flynn

If I dwell at some length on the tremors and gropings of that distant night, it is because I insist upon proving that I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel. The gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of poets-not crime's prowling ground. Had I reached my goal, my ecstasy would have been all softness, a case of internal combustion of which she would hardly have felt the heat, even if she were wide awake. But I still hoped she might gradually be engulfed in a completeness of stupor that would allow me to taste more than a glimmer of her. — Vladimir Nabokov

Birds-eye view
Awake the stars 'cause they're all around you
Wide eyes will always brighten the blue
Chase your dreams
And remember me, sweet bravery
'Cause after all those wings will take you up so high
So bid the forest floor goodbye as you race the wind
And take to the sky — Owl City

Why are you only coming home just after three? Do you want a drink? I'm wide awake now.'
He could be so like a small child, she thought. Out of nowhere, all eagerness and curiosity. — Val McDermid

Hey," he says.
I feel foolish for being out of breath and standing over him. The moonlight cuts a line down my chest. "Hey," I say.
"Checking on me?"
"I couldn't sleep. Scottie. She's in the bathroom." I stop talking.
"Yeah?" he says and sits up.
"She's playacting." I don't know how to say it. I don't need to say it. "She's kissing the mirror."
"Oh," he says. "I used to do some messed-up things as a kid. Still do."
I feel wide awake, which always makes me angry in the middle of the night. I'm useless without sleep. I can't get myself to go back to my own room. I sit on the end of the bed by his feet. "I'm worried about my daughters," I say. "I'm worried there's something wrong with them."
Sid rubs his eyes.
"Forget it," I say. "Sorry for waking you up."
"It's going to get worse," he says. "After your wife dies." He holds the blanket up to his chin. — Kaui Hart Hemmings

In the end, I listen to my fear. It keeps me awake, resounding through the frantic beating in my breast. It is there in the dry terror in my throat, in the pricking of the rats' nervous feet in the darkness. Christian has not come home all the night long. I know, for I have lain in this darkness for hours now with my eyes stretched wide, yearning for my son's return. — Ned Hayes

God does not exist, as neither does our hereafter, that second bogey being as easily disposed of as the first. Indeed, imagine yourself just dead - and suddenly wide awake in Paradise where, wreathed in smiles, your dear dead welcome you.
Now tell me, please, what guarantee do you possess that those beloved ghosts are genuine; that it is really your dear dead mother and not some petty demon mystifying you, masked as your mother and impersonating her with consummate art and naturalness? There is the rub, there is the horror; the more so as the acting will go on and on, endlessly; never, never, never, never, never will your soul in that other world be quite sure that the sweet gentle spirits crowding about it are not fiends in disguise, and forever, and forever, and forever shall your soul remain in doubt, expecting every moment some awful change, some diabolical sneer to disfigure the dear face bending over you. — Vladimir Nabokov

Simon blinked himself awake, confused, for a moment, why he was in a dungeon that smelled of dung rather than his Brooklyn bedroom - then, once he got his bearings, confused all over again about why he was being awoken in the middle of the night by a wide-eyed Scotsman.
"Is there a fire?" Simon asked. "There better be a fire. Or a demon attack. And I'm not talking about some puny lower-lever demon, mind you. You want to wake me up in the middle of a dream about rock superstardom, it better be a Greater Demon. — Cassandra Clare

So they gave me love in form of poison and tiny little pills, programming my emotions, teaching me how to feel. To act correct and talk correct and answer without knowing the question, because that, my dear, is how you get love. Yes that, dear youth, is how you'll be loved. I tried to medicate my own fucked up little mind with chemicals and adrenaline, tasting sweeter every night, shaking louder every time. Sitting wide awake in bed until the world disappears, writing poetry to concentrate on something real while waiting for the love to arrive.
I've been looking for it night after night, waiting patiently for it to show up, maybe somewhere in between the state of awake and asleep, alive and not so alive, sober and not so sober.
(I lost track of the difference somewhere in between.) — Charlotte Eriksson

Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake? — Virginia Woolf

The nearest thing we have to a defence against [the gods] (but there is no real defence) is to be very wide awake and sober and hard at work, to hear no music, never to look at earth or sky, and (above all) to love no one. — C.S. Lewis

It takes a person who is wide awake to make his dream come true. — Roger Babson

THE LAKE IN youth's spring it was my lot To haunt of the wide earth a spot The which I could not love the less; So lovely was the loneliness Of a wild lake, with black rock bound, And the tall pines that tower'd around. But when the night had thrown her pall Upon that spot - as upon all, And the wind would pass me by In its stilly melody, My infant spirit would awake To the terror of the lone lake. Yet that terror was not fright - But a tremulous delight, And a feeling undefined, Springing from a darken'd mind. Death was in that poison'd wave And in its gulf a fitting grave For him who thence could solace bring To his dark imagining; Whose wildering thought could even make An Eden of that dim lake. — Edgar Allan Poe

The man who only loves beautiful things is dreaming, whereas the man who knows absolute beauty is wide awake. — Bertrand Russell

I would say practical progressive, which means that the Republican party or any political party has got to recognize the problems of a growing and complex industrial civilization. And I don't think the Republican party is really wide awake to that. — Alf Landon

Faith I have, in myself, in humanity, in the worthwhileness of the pursuits in entertainment for the masses. But wide awake, not blind faith, moves me. My operations are based on experience, thoughtful observation and warm fellowship with my neighbors at home and around the world. — Walt Disney

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

Tibetans are not famed for their perseverance. Full of enthusiasm at the start, and ready for anything new, their interest flags before long. For this reason I kept losing pupils and replacing them, which was not very satisfactory for me. The children of good families whom I taught were without exception intelligent and wide awake, and were not inferior to our children in comprehension. In the Indian schools the Tibetan pupils are ranked for intelligence with Europeans. One must remember that they have to learn the language of their teachers. In spite of that handicap, they are often at the head of the class. There was a boy from Lhasa at St. Joseph's College, at Darjeeling, who was not only the best scholar in the school, but also champion in all the games and sports. — Heinrich Harrer

Shall the dire day break when life
finds us merely husband and wife
with passion not so much denied
as neatly laundered and put aside
and the old joyous insistence
trimmed to placid coexistence?

Shall we sometime arise from bed
with not a carnal thought in our head
look at each other without surprise
out of wide awake uncandid eyes
touch and know no immediate urge
where all mysteries converge?

Speak for the sake of something to say
and now and then put on a display
of elaborate mimicry of the past to prove
that ritual reigns where once ruled love
and calmly observe those bleak rites
that once made splendour of our nights?

Dear, when we stop being outrageous
and no longer find contagious
the innumerable ecstasies we find
in rise of hand or leap of mind -
not now or then, love, need we fear thus;
those two sad people will not be us. — Christy Brown

My soul is not asleep. It is awake, wide awake. It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches, its eyes wide open far-off things, and listens at the shores of the great silence. — Antonio Machado

When you're wide awake say it for goodness sake, it's gonna be a great day. — Paul McCartney

He was still wide awake when the morning came - the light changed imperceptibly underground, with the glowtrees flaring up brightly, and the shimmer of golden dust that remained suspended in the musty air, as if millions of butterflies had shed the scales of their wings in midair. — Ekaterina Sedia

There's something covering my face, I can't breathe, I'm suffocating. When I surface into wakefulness, I'm gasping for air and my chest hurts. I sit up, eyes wide, and see something moving in the corner of the room, a dense centre of blackness that keeps growing, and I almost cry out - and then I'm properly awake and there's nothing there, but I am sitting up in bed and my cheeks are wet with tears. — Paula Hawkins

I don't snore."
He nodded with a wide grin. "It's a quiet peaceful kind of snoring. Like a small cuddly Tasmanian devil. Kind of cute when sleeping, all claws and teeth when awake."
"You snore worse. At least I don't turn into a lion in my sleep. — Ilona Andrews

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 can get a call at 2 A.M., and the person on the other end is like: 'Sorry, did I wake you?' and I'm like: 'No, I'm wide awake.' — Estelle

I do not feel brave. I feel a hundred years old and very, very tired - yet wide awake with worry. — Carrie Anne Noble

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

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

Travel never made a bore interesting; it only makes for a well-traveled bore, in the same way coffee makes for a wide-awake drunk. In fact, the more a bore travels, the worse he gets. The only advantage in it for his friends and family is that he isn't home as much. — Peg Bracken

It took a moment to right himself, and he pulled his shoulders back as he regained his equilibrium. He didn't want to be half asleep the first time he kissed Ellie. For that, he wanted to be wide awake. — Jennifer E. Smith

... 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

Make your initial contact short and sweet. Five sentences or less, or under 150 words. If someone instant messages you while you're online, go ahead and IM them back if you want. Otherwise, wait twenty-two to twenty-three hours between email contacts for the first few messages. Don't send messages while most people are sleeping, even if you're wide-awake. Shoot for business hours or just after dinnertime. — Amy Webb

Thank you, Daylight Savings Time, for making people wax on about the wonder of an extra hour of sleep, only to serve as an especially depressing reminder to parents that kids don't care about farmers and harvests and extra hours of daylight. I enjoy my kids standing at my bedside at 4:30 a.m. like creepy, wide-awake Children of the Corn. Naptimes are also jacked, so there's that. With all due respect-ish, A Tired Mom. — Jen Hatmaker

The old superstition about fiction being 'wicked' has doubtless died out in England; but the spirit of it lingers in a certain oblique regard directed toward any story which does not more or less admit that it is only a joke. Even the most jocular novel feels in some degree the weight of the proscription that was formerly directed against literary levity; the jocularity does not always succeed in passing for gravity. It is still expected, though perhaps people are ashamed to say it, that a production which is after all only a 'make believe' (for what else is a 'story'?) shall be in some degree apologetic-shall renounce the pretension of attempting really to compete with life. This, of course, any sensible wide-awake story declines to do, for it quickly perceives that the tolerance granted to it on such a condition is only an attempt to stifle it, disguised in the form of generosity. — Henry James

far too many people die with a heart thats gone flat with indiferance, and it surely must be a terrible way to go. Life will offer amazing oppurtunities, but we've got to be wide-awake to recognize them. — Beth Hoffman

Winter has caused damage everywhere: meadow and forest are all grey, where before you heard many sounds. If I could see the girls play ball on the street, then bird song would come back. If only I could sleep through the winter! When I am awake I feel only hatred that his power is so far and wide. God knows, he even fights with May; I picked flowers where there is now snow. — Walther Von Der Vogelweide

To wake in the night: be wide awake in an instant, with all your faculties on edge: to wake, and be under compulsion to set in, night for night, at the same point, knowing from grim experience, that the demons awaiting you have each to be grappled with in turn, no single one of them left unthrown, before you can win through to the peace that is utter exhaustion. — Henry Handel Richardson

She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world. — Jeanette Winterson

[4.7-11] Everything in the world is about to be wrapped up, so take nothing for granted. Stay wide-awake in prayer. Most of all, love each other as if your life depended on it. Love makes up for practically anything. Be quick to give a meal to the hungry, a bed to the homeless - cheerfully. Be generous with the different things God gave you, passing them around so all get in on it: if words, let it be God's words; if help, let it be God's hearty help. That way, God's bright presence will be evident in everything through Jesus, and he'll get all the credit as the One mighty in everything - encores to the end of time. Oh, yes! — Eugene H. Peterson

Better to get up late and be wide awake then, than to get up early and be asleep all day. — Matthew Henry

We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet's crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add - until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use. — Annie Dillard

Imagine a fade-out here, if you please, or one of those discreet rows of asterisks, to indicate the passage of time - not very much time, admittedly, as one of us was out of practice and perhaps a little overexcited - anyway, we return to the scene with the two participants lying back on their pillows, bedsheets now chastely drawn up to their chins, watched silently through the doorway by a stuffed otter and the head of a china basset hound, half-hidden under a frayed gingham tablecloth. Everything was perfectly still; it felt like no one in the whole wide world was awake but us - like we had stolen a march on time, and although our problems waited for us on the other side, these moments were ours to let float by as we pleased. How sweet it was, after so much turbulence, not even to have to talk, or think. — Paul Murray

Children are young, but they're not naive. And they're honest. They're not going to keep wide awake if the story is boring. When they get excited you can see it in their eyes. — Chinua Achebe

I've got a gig," Jim said.
I sat up in my bed, wide-awake. A gig was good- I needed the money. "Half."
"Third."
"Half."
"Thirty-five percent." Jim's voice hardened.
"Half."
The phone went silent as my former Guild partner mulled it over. "Okay, forty."
I hung up.( ... )
The phone rang. I let it ring twice before I picked it up.
"Fine." Jim's voice had a hint of a snarl in it. "Half. — Ilona Andrews

Wide awake to the presence of God, I realized I had been so focused on asking why a good God allowed bad things to happen that I was missing out on the nearness of God all along. In becoming preoccupied with the why, I was missing the who. — Margaret Feinberg

Be alive, be wide awake, be anything but boring. — Shey Stahl

I want to establish a wide range and play all kinds of parts. It's that sort of acting career I really respect. I like to turn a sharp left from whatever I've done before because that keeps me awake. That's why I want to be an actor - I don't want to play endless variations on one character. — Tim Curry

I've tried counting sheep like everyone recommends, but what tends to happen is that my brain thinks it's seen the same sheep twice and that messes up my count, and when I think there's no more sheep to count, another three will come running along and startle me. Or just as I think I've finished counting, an elephant comes running in. By this point I'm wide awake. — Karl Pilkington

You know what it's like when you're trying to fall asleep and it only makes you more wide awake? — Haruki Murakami

A beautiful and binding morning
The world outside begins to breathe
See clouds arriving without warning
I need you here to shelter me.
If I could make these moments endless
If I could stop the winds of change
If we just keep our eyes wide open
Then everything would stay the same
And I know that only time will tell me how
We'll carry on without each other
So keep me awake for every moment
Give us more time to be this way
We can't stay like this forever
But I can have you next to me today — Josh Groban

I turned my face to let his nose rub my cheek. "Mason, let's just stay here," I told him breathlessly.
He chuckled, huskily and dangerously. "Oh, no, absolutely not. I'm not to be trusted with you alone right now. — Shelly Crane

Even though disciplined sleeping habits and the adrenalin of live radio ensures that we are very awake while on duty, there is evidence of a phenomenon called circadian desynchronosis which causes one's brain to function slowly at those times of day when it thinks it should be asleep, regardless how wide awake the body is. — Evan Davis

To a soul which is wide awake, the Judgment Day does not come after death.
For that soul every day is a Judgment Day.
The Judgment Day is every day, and one realizes this as one's sight becomes more keen. Every hour, every moment in life has its judgment. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

Because, really, what was worse than lying wide-awake in the dark, watching your life drip away, one irreplaceable minute after another? — Tom Perrotta

It takes me five rounds to hit the middle of the target, and when I do, a rush of energy goes through me. I am awake, my eyes wide open, my hands warm. — Veronica Roth

It's okay,' he says, eyes closed. He's not even awake. 'It's okay.'
He says these words even in his sleep, like he has said them so often that it's his mouth's default sentiment. All this pain in his life, all this care he doles out to everyone else. And yet he still cracks his broken heart open even wider - wide enough to fit me, too. I wonder how much this must hurt him, the toll it just take to give more of himself to me when he already has so little left to give.
In slumber, his arm stays wrapped around me, encasing me for safekeeping. He would protect me even in his unconscious state, as we lie beneath my ceiling's half-painted sky.
This thought is enough to swell my heart - to swell, and to break. — Emery Lord

Ah, pray no mistake, We are not shy; We're very wide awake The Moon and I. — W.S. Gilbert

Wide awake I can make my most fantastic dreams come true. — Lorenz Hart

...we'd be okay. Not perfect, not entirely healthy, not even rational where our love for one another was concerned. Just okay. Merely sufficient, at best. But there'd be only acceptance - never shame - in being two divine failures as we emerged from slumber, perfectly flawed, and wide awake. — AngstGoddess003

This explains so much," she said, clucking her tongue in mother-hen fashion. "You're compensating for this withered appendage."
Withered appendage? What the devil was she talking about? He shook his head, trying to clear it. Colin's dire predictions of shriveled twigs and dried currants rattled in his skull. Wide awake now, he fought to sit up, wrestling the sheets.
"Listen, you. I don't know what sort of liberties you've taken while I was insensible, or just what your spinster imagination prepared you to see. But I'll have you know, that water was damned cold."
She blinked at him. "I'm referring to your leg."
"Oh." His leg. That withered appendage — Tessa Dare

It's impossible to be really sad when you're asleep. You can be happy and afraid and angry in your dreams, but you have to be wide awake to be sad, don't you think? — Gregory David Roberts

A new darkness pulled away the room, inked out flesh and outlined bones. My mother was wide awake again. She become sharply herself - bone, wire, antenna - but she was not afraid. She had been pared down like this before, when she had travelled up the mountains into rare snow - alone in white not unlike being alone in black. She had also sailed a boat safely between land and land. — Maxine Hong Kingston

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

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

He sighed. "Why are you sitting out here? If you came this far, why don't you go in and see her? She knows you're here, after all."
My head snapped up. "She's awake?"
I watched Darren turn to look at me, a sad smile on his lips. "No, not yet."
"Then how do you know she knows?"
"Her heart rate's been steady all day. It picked up about fifteen minutes ago," he said, then quirked his brow. "How long have you been sitting out here?"
I stared up at him in wide-eyed shock. "About fifteen minutes."
"That's what I thought. — K.I. Lynn

Careful amidst the careless, amongst the sleeping wide-awake, the intelligent man leaves them all behind, like a race-horse does a mere hack. — Gautama Buddha

The committed student needs to be wide awake, to look and listen closely, to slow down, scrutinize and reflect. The language of poetry is so dense, so multivalent, that it demands a concentrated act of attention - and offers its greatest rewards only to those who reread. — Ezra Pound

But we are so blind to our own shortcomings, so wide awake to those of others. Everything that happens to us is always the other person's fault. — Jerome K. Jerome

I want to give you back your first kiss, the one that jerk stole from
you. And I want it to be something that even a coma can't make you
forget. — Shelly Crane

Henry Ward Beecher, so the story goes, was once asked by a young preacher how he could keep his congregation wide awake and attentive during his sermons. Beecher replied that he always had a man watch for sleepers, with instructions, as soon as he saw anyone start nodding or dozing, to hasten to the pulpit and wake up the preacher. Aren't you and I usually less sensible? Would we not be inclined to have the watcher wake up not ourselves but the fellows caught sleeping? In other words, aren't we disposed always to blame others? — B.C. Forbes

Every mental process, or every mental action, that takes place in our wide-awake consciousness will, if it has depth of feeling or intensity, enter the unconscious field, and after it has developed itself according to the line of its original nature, will return to the conscious side of the mind. — Christian D. Larson

Love finds you in the strangest places, and hope clings to us in the nooks and crannies we never think to look. — Shelly Crane

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

YOU WEREN'T born choking on no silver spoon, you know how it goes when you go looking for a job and you need one: You wait in the first indifferent room, ink in the forms, apply in another room with linoleum that's waxy and squeaks and overhead lights that don't miss a thing; then there's the desk and the person behind it who thinks he's an admiral, or it's a she and she thinks she's now in line for the throne to somewhere, and next you're kissing ass and aw-shucksing toward the desk, telling how bad all your life you've been wanting to be night janitor in a chemical plant, or hog wrangler in a slaughterhouse, or pizza delivery boy, how you've laid awake in bed gettin' goose bumps just from imagining how high and wide your life might someday be lived if ever you could average five dollars and forty cents an hour. But — Daniel Woodrell

He went to the table and picked up a football magazine, opened it, thumbed through it, and was thumbing through it again when he said: "Scout, if there's ever anything that happens to you or something - you know - something you might not want to tell Atticus about - " "Huh?" "You know, if you get in trouble at school or anything - you just let me know. I'll take care of you." Jem sauntered from the livingroom, leaving Jean Louise wide-eyed and wondering if she were fully awake. — Harper Lee

It is certainly not then - not in dreams - but when one is wide awake, in moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.
- Vladimir Nabokov — Vladimir Nabokov

I was wide awake, and yet part of me was so glassed-off and numb I was practically in a coma. — Donna Tartt

Has my heart gone to sleep?
Have the beehives of my dreams
stopped working, the waterwheel
of the mind run dry,
scoops turning empty,
only shadow inside?
No, my heart is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
Not asleep, not dreaming
its eyes are opened wide
watching distant signals, listening
on the rim of vast silence — Antonio Machado

For my part I love sleepy fellows, and the more ignorant the better. Damn your wide-awake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, itis one of the noblest qualities of humanity. There is something sociable about it, too. Think of those sensible & sociable millions of good fellows all taking a good long friendly snooze together, under the sod
no quarrels, no imaginary grievances, no envies, heart-burnings, & thinking how much better that other chap is off
none of this: but all equally free-&-easy, they sleep away & reel off their nine knots an hour, in perfect amity. — Herman Melville

What do you want to trust me with tonight?"
A sigh escaped forcefully, waving the white flag that I was a melted, scorched woman at those words.
"Anything," I whispered back. — Shelly Crane

I live a super-healthy lifestyle not because it's sensible or that I'm contrite, but because I need to keep my focus on the music I'm making. To do that, I need to be wide awake. — Johnny Marr

Now it's clear to me/ that everything you see/ ain't always what it seems, — Katy Perry

[NINA]
When I was a child I stayed wide awake
Climbed to the highest place
On every fire escape
Restless to climb

I got every scholarship
Saved every dollar
The first to go to college
How do I tell them why
I'm coming back home? — Lin-Manuel Miranda

Over and over again I have said that there is no way out of the present impasse. If we were wide awake we would be instantly struck by the horrors which surround us ... We would drop our tools, quit our jobs, deny our obligations, pay no taxes, observe no laws, and so on. Could the man or woman who is thoroughly awakened possibly do the crazy things which are now expected of him or her every moment of the day? — Henry Miller

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

Laila And The Khalifa

The Khalifa said to Laila,
"Art thou really she
For whom Majnun lost his head
and went distracted?
Thou art not fairer than many
other fair ones."
She replied, "Be silent;
thou art not Majnun!"


If thou hadst Majnun's eyes,
The two worlds would be within thy view.
Thou art in thy senses, but Majnun is beside himself.
In love to be wide awake is treason.
The more a man is awake, the more he sleeps (to love);
His (critical) wakefulness is worse than slumbering.


Our wakefulness fetters our spirits,
Then our souls are a prey to divers whims,
Thoughts of loss and gain and fears of misery.
They retain not purity, nor dignity, nor lustre,
Nor aspiration to soar heavenwards.
That one is really sleeping who hankers after each whim
And holds parley with each fancy. — Jalaluddin Rumi

I'm all out o faith, this is how I feel. I'm cold and I am shamed lying naked on the floor. Illusions never change into something real. I'm wide awake and I can see the perfect sky is torn. You're a little late, I'm already torn. — Natalie Imbruglia

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works. — Carl Sagan

There are some who do not learn, and who do not improve as fast as they might, because their eyes and their hearts are not upon God; they do not reflect neither do they have that knowledge which they might have; they miss a good deal which they might receive. We have got to obtain knowledge before we obtain permanent happiness; we have got to be wide awake in the things of God. — Lorenzo Snow

I stare at my freakish eyeball, gaze into the distorted pupil until it expands and fills the mirror, fills my brain and I'm rushing through vacuum. Wide awake and so far at such speed I flatten into a subatomic contrail. That grand cosmic maw, that eater of galaxies, possesses sufficient gravitational force to rend the fabric of space and time, to obliterate reality, and in I go, bursting into trillions of minute particles, quadrillions of whining fleas, consumed. Nanoseconds later, I understand everything there is to understand. Reduced to my "essential saltes" as it were, I'm the prime mover seed that gets sown after the heat death of the universe when the Ouroboros swallows itself and the cycle begins anew with a big bang. — Laird Barron

Shaken from sleep, and numbed and scarce awake,
Out in the trench with three hours' watch to take,
I blunder through the splashing mirk; and then
Hear the gruff muttering voices of the men
Crouching in cabins candle-chinked with light.
Hark! There's the big bombardment on our right
Rumbling and bumping; and the dark's a glare
Of flickering horror in the sectors where
We raid the Boche; men waiting, stiff and chilled,
Or crawling on their bellies through the wire.
"What? Stretcher-bearers wanted? Some one killed?"
Five minutes ago I heard a sniper fire:
Why did he do it? ... Starlight overhead
Blank stars. I'm wide-awake; and some chap's dead. — Siegfried Sassoon

Up ahead were two bleary-eyed truck stops-- nothing said exhaustion like the wide-awake lights of a truck stop. He chose the larger one. — Maggie Stiefvater

Dear young people, Christ asks you to be wide awake and alert, to see the things in life that really matter. — Pope Francis

We've heard that you don't need a near-death experience to see Guardians. Just be more wide awake when you dream. — Stefanie Samek

A sleepy smile pulled at my lips as I rolled onto my stomach, stretching my legs out and pointing my toes. The sheets slipped over my bare skin and ended up somewhere at the foot of my bed. There was either a perverted ghost in my bedroom or Cam was wide awake. — J. Lynn

Even if I'd been wide awake, I knew Dimitri would've taken my suitcase anyway. That's how he was, a lost remnant of chivalry in the modern world, ever-ready to help others. — Richelle Mead

Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. — Ursula K. Le Guin