Best 246 quotes in «insomnia quotes» category

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.

And so, now, it is almost midnight of the first day, and I have broken my resolution to go to bed early - postponing sleep, and thereby the inevitable waking up in tomorrow. Another device of escape.

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.

An intensely gripping narrative...expertly crafted and totally addictive...a must read!

Astray from a deep sleep chronic as I write by phonics, like insomnia I will always live the onyx night for revealing, and, upon it, still I'll steal the bright light of day right away just to keep building at speeds hypersonic.

As an artist suffering from insomnia and working from my apartment, I had an artistic freedom to explore and create awesome stuff. I wore a robe and slippers as my work dress code. These are the days when creativity is my best imaginary friend. And I was crazy enough to create what people would call masterpieces.

Between the midnight and the morning: on a given day, that's the hardest stretch of time to fill.

But who, in these modern times, slept well?

Black as--the centre of an eye, the centre, a blackness that sucks at light. I love your vigilance Night, first mother of songs, give me the voice to sing of you in those fingers lies the bridle of the four winds. Crying out, offering words of homage to you, I am only a shell where the ocean is still sounding. But I have looked too long into human eyes. Reduce me now to ashes--Night, like a black sun.

Both sleep and insomnolency, when immoderate, are bad.

Every man’s insomnia is as different from his neighbor’s as are their daytime hopes and aspirations.

Carla's description was typical of survivors of chronic childhood abuse. Almost always, they deny or minimize the abusive memories. They have to: it's too painful to believe that their parents would do such a thing. So they fragment the memories into hundreds of shards, leaving only acceptable traces in their conscious minds. Rationalizations like "my childhood was rough," "he only did it to me once or twice," and "it wasn't so bad" are common, masking the fact that the abuse was devastating and chronic. But while the knowledge, body sensations, and feelings are shattered, they are not forgotten. They intrude in unexpected ways: through panic attacks and insomnia, through dreams and artwork, through seemingly inexplicable compulsions, and through the shadowy dread of the abusive parent. They live just outside of consciousness like noisy neighbors who bang on the pipes and occasionally show up at the door.

Don't start me talking I could talk all night My mind goes sleepwalking While I'm putting the world to right.

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

Finally, as the sky began to grow light in the morning, I’d feel that I might be drifting off. But that wasn’t sleep. My fingertips were just barely brushing against the outermost edge of sleep. And all the while, my mind was awake. I would feel a hint of drowsiness, but my mind was there, in its own room, on the other side of a transparent wall, watching me. My physical self was drifting through the feeble morning light, and all the while it could feel my mind staring, breathing, close beside it. I was both a body on the verge of sleep and a mind determined to stay awake. The incomplete drowsiness would continue on and off all day. My head was always foggy. I couldn’t get an accurate fix on the things around me—their distance or mass or texture. The drowsiness would overtake me at regular, wavelike intervals: on the subway, in the classroom, at the diner table. My mind would slip away from my body. The world would sway soundlessly. I would drop things. My pencil or my purse or my fork would clatter to the floor. All I wanted was to throw myself down and sleep. But I couldn’t. The wakefulness was always there beside me. I could feel its chilling shadow. It was the shadow of myself. Weird, I would think as the drowsiness overtook me, I’m in my own shadow. I would walk and eat and talk to people inside my drowsiness. And the strangest thing was that no one noticed. I lost fifteen pounds that month, and no one noticed. No one in my family, not one of my friends or classmates, realized that I was going through life asleep. It was literally true: I was going through life asleep. My body had no more feeling than a drowned corpse. My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think that my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. Hold tight, I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.

Finally, as the sky began to grow light in the morning, I’d feel that I might be drifting off. But that wasn’t sleep. My fingertips were just barely brushing against the outermost edge of sleep. And all the while, my mind was awake. I would feel a hint of drowsiness, but my mind was there, in its own room, on the other side of a transparent wall, watching me. My physical self was drifting through the feeble morning light, and all the while it could feel my mind staring, breathing, close beside it. I was both a body on the verge of sleep and a mind determined to stay awake. The incomplete drowsiness would continue on and off all day. My head was always foggy. I couldn’t get an accurate fix on the things around me—their distance or mass or texture. The drowsiness would overtake me at regular, wavelike intervals: on the subway, in the classroom, at the dinner table. My mind would slip away from my body. The world would sway soundlessly. I would drop things. My pencil or my purse or my fork would clatter to the floor. All I wanted was to throw myself down and sleep. But I couldn’t. The wakefulness was always there beside me. I could feel its chilling shadow. It was the shadow of myself. Weird, I would think as the drowsiness overtook me, I’m in my own shadow. I would walk and eat and talk to people inside my drowsiness. And the strangest thing was that no one noticed. I lost fifteen pounds that month, and no one noticed. No one in my family, not one of my friends or classmates, realized that I was going through life asleep. It was literally true: I was going through life asleep. My body had no more feeling than a drowned corpse. My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think that my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. Hold tight, I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.

He had to take sleep by surprise. Preparing for bed simply alerted insomnia, brought all the busy thoughts, the renegade remorses and guilts and recriminations.

For the record, while it's very charming that you keep trying to protect me, I would like to remind you that I actually know how to defend myself." He grimaced. "I know. It's just... instinct." "Well, stop it." He held his hands up. "Won't happen again." He hesitated. I mean, unless I'm pretty sure you're about to die, then I'm absolutely going to rescue you, whether you like it or not.

From insomnia and as a result of the intense struggle against mounting weakness, something strange is happening to me. In the midst of a lecture, tears suddenly choke me, my eyes begin to itch, and I feel a passionate, hysterical desire to stretch my arms out and complain loudly. I want to cry in a loud voice that fate has sentenced me, a famous man, to capital punishment, and that in six months or so another man will be master of this auditorium. I want to cry out that I've been poisoned; new thoughts such as I have never known before have poisoned the last days of my life and go on stinging my brain like mosquitoes. And at such times my situation seems so terrible that I want all my listeners to be horrified, to jump up from their seats and, in panic fear, rush for the exit with a desperate cry. It is not easy to live through such moments.

From the tattered edges of an exhausted mind, inspiration blooms... mental filters disintegrate and walls crumble, as the ocean of creativity washes over everything.

Have you ever watched one thing? – whatsoever is your last thought in the night will be your first thought in the morning. That’s why all the religions have insisted on one praying before one goes to sleep, so the last thought remains of prayer, the last thought remains of god, and it goes and sinks into one’s heart. The whole night it remains like an aroma around you – it fills your inner space, and in the morning when you awake, again it is there.

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.

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

His impatience for sleep often frightened that very sleep away.

Her eyes are like bruises, as though 2am punches her in the face every time they meet amid the faded glow of alarm-clock hands and the crumpled sheets of a sleepless night.

Hij bleef zoals hij is, zwart en stil en besprenkeld met sterren.

I can’t sleep alone anymore and I get used to company too quickly. You’re always gone too soon.

I call modern electronic light bulbs ‘Insomnia light bulbs’ because they are known to disrupt sleep.

I call modern large screen televisions “Insomnia TV’s” because they are known to disrupt sleep.

I didn't sleep all night, thinking. I thought about you, about those puppy eyes you give me, when you fake your sadness to make me smile-- and that upper lip of yours that brings life to all of my senses. I thought about your laughter when you get tickled, and that soft mellow place near your arm pit that I wish could be knit into a pillow for me to hug all night long. I thought about your stomach, your soft and sensitive stomach, scared like a baby kitten under the pouring rain. And I remembered the feeling of protection that comes washing over me when I get a glimpse of it, the feeling of covering it with the layers of my very own skin. I remembered your head when it rests on my heart, a rock sheltering itself on the verdure of infinity. I remembered your silky black hair, and how I never imagined that hair curls so thin could twirl, in the way they do, the rigid core of my existence.

I crave stillness, And yet I fear the moment Stillness turns into boredom, And the moment boredom Turns into loneliness.

In insomnia we encounter the very heart of love’s darkness: the essential otherness of the beloved.

I fix the cramped, lined pages with my curious stare. How do you come to exist?

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

...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.

In living this way, we discover new opportunities for comfort and enjoyment. Where the younger person may have tossed and turned throughout a sleepless night, the older man or woman can possibly feel the pleasure that comes from lying on a good mattress, resting one's weary bones and overcharged intellect, whether or not one sleeps throughout the hours of darkness.

In night... in night is when my mind is a flutter, and the world ablaze. In night I see you, subtle, yet sure wrinkles in your smile and the echoes of your laugh. In night my mind tries to forget, but it is still there branded as etchings. In night my heart is set a fire thrashing to and fro from distant lands and seas. You were a sailor but your anchor was no match for the wild waves and so you floated, but quickly sank. And in night I write about a hundred moons and a hundred deaths. But they are all you. For you are the sky and the wild seas. And in night, I think, I will sail across your shore once again and once more.

[...] I'd wake up in the middle of the night to the Star-Spangled Banner and some old film of a flag blowing in the wind, telling you the day was over and it was long past time to go to bed. That was back when days used to end, before CNN and infomercials, before all our days bled right into each other.

If the world leaders can afford a 7 hours sleep, most of us probably can too.

I hadn't slept for seven nights. My mother told me I must have slept, it was impossible not to sleep in all that time, but if I slept, it was with my eyes wide open, for I had followed the green, luminous course of the second hand and the minute hand and the hour hand of the bedside clock through their circles and semi-circles, every night for seven nights, without missing a second, or a minute, or an hour. The reason I hadn't washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly. I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue. It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.

I’m awake and I can’t sleep. The more I’m awake, the more I see, and the harder to sleep.

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.

I never noticed anything but you But you but you So that I couldn't sleep

Insomniacs should not be forced to exist in a realm with reflective glass. From the first look I’m boxed in a prism, rainbows charming the other dark-circled self into sharing my prison. One eye turns on the other, each accusing the other of being responsible for an appearance oddly elfin, before exiting head and bouncing like lottery balls through the mirror walls and then drifting up and out the open and unguarded Well of the Wyrd. There, everyone with mirrors and mushrooms is waiting for me, faded and dissolved into giggles.

Insomnia I wonder If those talks matter Few done in the clarity of day Or the many Done at 3 a.m. in the morning

Insomniacs exaggerate the pleasures of sleep.

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.

Insomnia, then, is not just a state of sleeplessness, a matter of negatives. It involves the active pursuit of sleep. It is a state of longing.

Insomnia can be a gift. More time for reading, writing and walking. More time to live.

insomnia has this romantic way of making the moon feel like perfect company.