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.
- 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"
