Best 246 quotes in «insomnia quotes» category

Pack up all my care and woe, blackbird, bye-bye

Perhaps it's something other than insomnia, to lie listening to children yelling as if they've re-created light; to try to dream, but succeed only in remembering; to toss and sweat in a dirty paste of sheets, while the drone of a ball game is gradually replaced by the buzz of a fly -- a fly buzzing like the empty frequencies between stations as its shadow grows enormous between the shade and windowpane. Is it insomnia for a man to wad his ears with the cotton from a pill bottle, to mask his eyes with blinders, and press a stale pillow over his head, praying for another day to burn down, so he can wake into another night?

Poor sleepers should endeavor to compose themselves. Tampering with empty space, stirring up echoes in pitch-black pits of darkness is scarcely sedative. ("Out Of The Deep")

Ralph reflected for a moment on the similarities between loneliness and insomnia — how they were both insidious, cumulative, and divisive, the friends of despair and the enemies of love.

Right now I can't even control my own imagination as it grips my hair and drags me into the dark

Rings and magazines; keychains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random... and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel.

She married the prince and all went well except for the fear — the fear of sleep. Briar Rose was an insomniac... She could not nap or lie in sleep without the court chemist mixing her some knock-out drops and never in the prince's presence.

Some thoughts are too angry to sleep. They lie awake all night and become obsessions.

Somewhere in the night a human being is drowning.

Sleep deprivation is physically miserable and creatively cathartic, as internal landscapes rise up from their dormant ashes.

Persons in whom a crisis takes place pass the night preceding the paroxysm uncomfortably, but the succeeding night generally more comfortably.

Survivors who don’t stand up for themselves often develop physical and emotional illnesses. Many become depressed because they feel so hopeless and helpless about being able to change their lives. They turn their anger inward and become prone to headaches, muscle tension, nervous conditions and insomnia.

The endless ocean was his sole companion , and on some deeply sentimental level, it seemed sufficient. Almost apt. He aligned himself with Thoreau and Tolstoy, he felt like their peers. The kinship with nature devoted humans to a mythical state, a heightened persona beyond the reach of mere mortals. At least that was what he told himself on the lonely nights when insomnia played on his fears and the howling wind pierced through his soul.

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others — who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without. To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals with one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

The industrial and technological revolutions have made our lives simpler, in terms of what is physically required of us on a daily basis, but they have also made it possible for us to do a whole lot less than we ought to be doing, and we suffer for it. We have become flabby and overweight; our joints and muscles have become stiff from lack of use. We suffer from all sorts of problems related to our lack of physical exercise; it affects us on all levels, causing high blood pressure, increased cholesterol, anxiety, depression, insomnia and the list goes on and on. We know, too, how much better we feel for a bit of exercise. Those “feel-good” hormones lift our spirits, boost self-esteem and improve our overall sense of well-being. It’s a sort of built-in reward system. There’s a reason for that. It’s because we are meant to be active.

The kingdom of sleep demands its forfeits, and the world looks very different through eyes cracked and yellow with its denial.

The incident plaguing him on this very night, did not have any relation to the jungles, the killing fields, the faces of villagers and the Vietcong, nor the hours of trekking through the mud, to destinations never revealed over the radios.

Then Night came down like the feathery soot of a smoky lamp, and smutted[9] first the bedquilt, then the hearth-rug, then the window-seat, and then at last the great, stormy, faraway outside world. But sleep did not come. Oh, no! Nothing new came at all except that particularly wretched, itching type of insomnia which seems to rip away from one's body the whole kind, protecting skin and expose all the raw, ticklish fretwork of nerves to the mercy of a gritty blanket or a wrinkled sheet. Pain came too, in its most brutally high night-tide; and sweat, like the smother of furs in summer; and thirst like the scrape of hot sand-paper; and chill like the clammy horror of raw fish.

The problem with radio frequency (RF) exposure is not the small amount of brain tumors, is it the large amount of subtle alterations in the brain that lead to attention, confusion, insomnia and fatigue problems.

That gap between half sleep and half awakening has always been occupied by nostalgia.

The loneliest thing in the world is lying awake beside someone asleep. ~ "The November Story

The monsters were never under my bed. Because the monsters were inside my head. I fear no monsters, for no monsters I see. Because all this time the monster has been me.

The night felt very long, but it ended as all nights do.

The problem is that people can't sleep when they want to, but if they are forbidden to do so, they can't help dropping off. So the method consisted of keeping your eyes wide open and fixing your gaze on some point of the bedroom wall. If by any chance you shut your eyes, hundreds of nasty little demons would pour out of the spot and eat you up. And you are absolutely not allowed to treat this as a joke.. According to Marc, you invariably fall asleep after ten minutes max, unless of course you replace the little devils with little fairies, which would stop you falling asleep at all.

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...)

there’s no way I can sleep in any position with so much still unwritten about the glory of basements, where, with all the promise in crock pot boxes, small animals go to die, piles of laundry hide the machines, rusted tools fall into other rusted tools giving way to unsung sculpture, soiled playing cards and unmatched socks strewn atop a punched-out screen door make a shaggy parquet; and a famished, leggy fluorescent tube barely winks on the entire scene.

The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.

The Sleep Problem today is not as much about being able to sleep for 7 hours; it is more about being able to sleep when you are ready to.

Those who wake at this hour feel a lonely separation from everyone but night birds and ghost crabs, never imagining the legion of kindred souls scattered in the darkness, who stare at ceilings and pace floors and look out windows and covet and worry and mourn.

Tonight - I am alone in the night, a homeless and sleepless nun! Tonight I hold all the keys to this the only capital city and lack of sleep guides me on my path. You are so lovely, my dusky Kremlin! Tonight I put my lips to the breast of the whole round and warring earth. Now I feel hair - like fur - standing on end: the stifling winds blow straight into my soul. Tonight I feel compassion for everyone, those who are pitied, along with those who are kissed.

Tonight is going to be a big night, like any other night, because certain 10 million Americans will not be able to sleep well tonight.

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

Waldo, I say-that is-aren't you tired, my boy?" Professor Buckley, suppressing a yawn, was unaccustomed to others matching his wakefulness wink for wink, as it were, and seemed jealous of the competition Waldo presented in that regard. "Who can sleep?" Waldo replied. "We're on another of these crazy roads, we can't find the interstate...." "Yes, I suppose you're right." The Professor interrupted, taking off his thick spectacles and polishing them on his bright tie. "I, on the other hand, never sleep, as I'm sure you're aware." Waldo smiled. The Professor had little in life to be vain about, and he wasn't going to stop him from expressing a little pride now and then.

The traditional techniques used in getting sleep aren’t much effective any longer and our sleep techniques need to evolve as rapidly as our life style has, in order to cope with it.

There's no rule that says you have to be a prodigy to be a hero," she insisted. "If people wanted to stand up for themselves or protect their loved ones or do what they believe in their hearts is the right thing to do, then they would do it. If they wanted to be heroic, they would find ways to be heroic, even without supernatural powers.

What delicious abandon in the sleep of the child. Where do we lose it?

When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep, and you're never really awake.

When you're in the throes of what feels like all-consuming pain, sleep is respite. It's your last refuge from the unrelenting guerilla attacks carried out against you by your own mind.

Whoever says sleep equals laziness is probably a bitter insomniac.

Women can go mad with insomnia. The sleep-deprived roam houses that have lost their familiarity. With tea mugs in hand, we wander rooms, looking on shelves for something we will recognize: a book title, a photograph, the teak-carved bird -- a souvenir from what place? A memory almost rises when our eyes rest on a painting's grey sweep of cloud, or the curve of a wooden leg in a corner. Fingertips faintly recall the raised pattern on a chair cushion, but we wonder how these things have come to be here, in this stranger's home. Lost women drift in places where time has collapsed. We look into our thoughts and hearts for what has been forgotten, for what has gone missing. What did we once care about? Whom did we love? We are emptied. We are remote. Like night lilies, we open in the dark, breathe in the shadowy world. Our soliloquies are heard by no one.

You are the biggest enemy of your own sleep.

You can drink yourself to sleep but not think yourself to sleep.

Yimello,' said Bernard finally, breaking the silence. 'Gesundheit?' I asked. 'It's a name for one of the colors that's invisible to us. Yimello," said Bernard. "There could also be glowl and novaly and replitz." 'Yes.' I nodded, stunned the kid could actually string together so many words at once. 'And, uh, don't forget the beautiful grynn, the luminous dulloff, or the subtle winooze.' Bernard's face lit up. He stood and started pacing the room, speaking quickly. 'Or salty, and insomnia, and carefree, and talkative, and lonely, and burnt, and punctual.' 'Some of my favorite colors,' I agreed, nodding. 'We could paint this room whisper. Or zigzag. Or maybe a nice shade of ignored and invisible.

Your brain needs plenty of rest to function at it's optimal level. Go to sleep!

You're like a dream I never want to wake up from, but I; I'm insomniac!

We stood there like that for a very long time until the sun had said its official good morning, and then Van turned me back to him. “Let’s go inside. It’s getting early and I have a feeling you could use some coffee.” I smiled, it’s getting early, that was the way I felt too, and I could definitely use some coffee.

Your dreams may seem impossible to someone with insomnia.

You’re slowly dying trying to find peace somehow.

You stay up until 3am - the time when the fine lines start to get blurry. You found yourself standing on the edge. You think you’re not supposed to be there so you jumped and crossed the line. You’ve come to a place where the voices are much louder…where the words are much clearer. It’s a place where the harmless things hurt you. It is where you wonder why the sea-like decisions you’ve made and the copper-like smiles has led you to loathe yourself. You wonder why your skin suddenly craves the feeling of metal. You laugh. Because it’s 3am- the time when salts and metals come together… the time when tears and blood embrace.

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.