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Sleep is sweet to the labouring man.
JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim's Progress
- We are such stuff
- As dreams are made on, and our little life
- Is rounded with a sleep.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Tempest
Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
WILLIAM GOLDING, Pincher Martin
There is nothing so entirely desirable in all the world as a few hours' oblivion.
ANNE REEVE ALDRICH, "An Evening With Callender"
- Care-charming Sleep, thou easer of all woes,
- Brother to Death, sweetly thyself dispose.
JOHN FLETCHER, The Tragedy of Valentinian
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, Fight Club
I go to bed, and I wait for sleep as a man might wait for the executioner. I wait for its coming with dread, and my heart beats and my legs tremble, while my whole body shivers beneath the warmth of the bedclothes, until the moment when I suddenly fall asleep, as a man throws himself into a pool of stagnant water in order to drown. I do not feel this perfidious sleep coming over me as I used to, but a sleep which is close to me and watching me, which is going to seize me by the head, to close my eyes and annihilate me.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT, "The Horla"
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick
- Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
- Brother to Death, in silent darkness born:
- Relieve my languish, and restore the light,
- With dark forgetting of my care return.
SAMUEL DANIEL, Sonnets to Delia
- Life dreams itself, contents to keep
- Happy immortality, in sleep.
ARTHUR SYMONS, "Alle Zattere"
What a blessing man acknowledges in sleep, whose soft oblivion makes an island of every day, and breaks the hold of continuous care; that cools the hot brain, and bathes the weary eye-lids, and lets the buffeted and foundering heart cast anchor every night in some harbor of happy dreams. He feels the beneficence of that law which makes even misery halt, and besieging fortune strike its tents, and in the great democracy of nature levels the children of men in common helplessness and common need; finding no conditions so wretched, no spot so bleak that even the most desperate cannot recline nearer to the bosom of the common mother, and forget for a little while their sorrow and their shame.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
J. M. COETZEE, Waiting for the Barbarians
God has made sleep to be a sponge by which to rub out fatigue. A man's roots are planted in night as in a soil.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
It is one of life's bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.
DANIEL HANDLER (as Lemony Snicket), The Grim Grotto
- O magic sleep! O comfortable bird,
- That broodest o’er the troubled sea of the mind
- Till it is hush’d and smooth!
Sleep. To lie down and shut out the noise, the fear, the unceasing misery.
TAD WILLIAMS, Otherland: City of Golden Shadow
We sleep, but the loom of life never stops; and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up tomorrow.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Life Thoughts
To achieve the impossible dream, try going to sleep.
JOAN KLEMPNER, Women's Health, Apr. 2006
- Sleep is a country
- whose border guards are fickle.
- Some people
- slip in and out without
- effort, unquestioned.
- For them, sleep is routine
- and therefore blank.
- For others, it is an excursion
- from which they bring back
- exotic souvenirs and memories of
- archetypal visitations.
ANNE LE DRESSAY, Sleep Is a Country
All men, whilst they are awake, are in one common world: but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own.
HERACLITUS, attributed, The Spectator, Sep. 18, 1755
- Sleep is the station grand
- Down which on either hand
- The hosts of witness stand.
EMILY DICKINSON, "Sleep is supposed to be"
Despite fifty years of research all we can conclude about the function of sleep is that it overcomes sleepiness, and that the only reliable finding from sleep deprivation experiments is that sleep loss makes us sleepy.
JAMES HORNE, Why We Sleep
Beneath the tides of Sleep and time strange fish are moving. For Sleep has crossed the worn visages of day, and in the night time, in the dark, in all the sleeping silence of the towns, the faces of ten million men are strange and dark as time. In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying in the darkness, and we know no death, there is no death, there is no life, no joy, no sorrow, and no glory on the earth but Sleep.
THOMAS WOLFE, From Death to Morning
I love sleep. My life has a tendency to fall apart when I'm awake.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY, attributed, Hunting for Hemingway
Sleep is a state essentially different from death, to which some authors have erroneously likened it. It merely suspends that portion of life, which serves to keep up with outward objects an intercourse necessary to our existence. One may say that sleep and waking call each other, and are of mutual necessity. The organs of sense and motion, weary of acting, rest; but there are many circumstances favouring this cessation of their activity. A continual excitation of the organs of sense would keep them continually awake; the removal of the material causes of our sensations tends, therefore, to plunge us into the arms of sleep; wherefore we indulge in it more voluptuously in the gloom and the stillness of night. Our organs fall asleep one after the other; the smell, the taste, and the sight are already at rest, when the hearing and the touch still send up faint impressions. The perceptions, awhile confused, in the end disappear: the internal senses cease acting; as well as the muscles allotted to voluntary motion, whose action is entirely subject to that of the brain.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH, A History of the Earth and Animated Nature
- Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care
- The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath
- Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
- Chief nourisher in life's feast.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth
Come, mild and magnificent Sleep, and let your tides flow through the nation. Oh, daughter of unmemoried desire, sister of Death, and my stern comrade, Loneliness, bringer of peace and dark forgetfulness, healer and redeemer, dear enchantress, hear us: come to us through the fields of night, over the plains and rivers of the everlasting earth, bringing to the huge vexed substance of this world and to all the fury, pain, and madness of our lives the merciful anodyne of your redemption. Seal up the porches of our memory, tenderly, gently, steal our lives away from us, blot out the vision of lost love, lost days, and all our ancient hungers, great Transformer, heal us!
THOMAS WOLFE, From Death to Morning
- Fair Sleep! mind-soothing, soul-bewitching Sleep!
- Come, fair enchantress, I would with thee speak--
- O come, and fan this fever from my cheek:
- I now with Thought no more communion keep;
- Be not afraid, fair spirit, to alight;
- Thy breath will soothe me into slumbers deep;
- My weary brain hath need of them tonight--
- Come Sleep!
ROBERT LEIGHTON, "To Sleep"
- What are the days but islands,
- So many little islands,
- And sleep the sea of silence,
- That flows about them all?
CAROLINE SPENCER, "Cruising"
No day is so bad it can't be fixed with a nap.
CARRIE SNOW, Women's Health, Apr. 2006
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