sleeping Quotes

“The night seemed long. Wilbur’s stomach was empty and his mind was full. And when your stomach is empty and your mind is full, it’s always hard to sleep.”

“This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best. Night, sleep, and the stars.”

“Death was a friend, and sleep was death’s brother.”

“As a purely mathematical fact, people who sleep less live more.”

“And sleep, that sometime shuts up sorrow’s eye, Steal me a while from mine own company.”

“Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer--both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.”

“Oh, the terrible struggle that I have had against sleep so often of late; the pain of the sleeplessness, or the pain of the fear of sleep, and with such unknown horror as it has for me! How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.”

There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapt in perfect unconsciousness.

Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.

However, everything has an end, everything passes away, even the hunger of people who have not eaten for fifteen hours. Our appetites satisfied, we felt overcome with sleep.

“I have not slept. Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream: The Genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection.”

“Most of all loved, when she went to sleep, to hear the Angel of Music.”

“So, surrender to sleep at last. What a misery, keeping watch through the night, wide awake -- you’ll soon come up from under all your troubles.”

“There is a time for making speeches, and a time for going to bed.”

“This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes?”

I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man stupid and blind in the eyes.

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”

He who’s down one day can be up the next, unless he really wants to stay in bed, that is.

“Life passes by now like the scenery outside a car window. I breathe and eat and sleep as I always did, but there seems to be no great purpose in my life that requires active participation on my part...I do not know where I am going or when I will get there.”

For years now, I’ve wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.

“Many nights I drifted off to sleep to his rumbling voice reading from a book of battle strategy. And despite myself, despite what he’d done and what he was, I came to love him. It’s just not a comfortable kind of love.”

“She opened the door to his room, crawled across the floor, looked up over the side of his bed; and if he was really asleep she picked him up and rocked him back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.”

“Pajamas? Poor people don’t wear pajamas. We fall asleep in our underwear or blue jeans. To this day, I find the very notion of pajamas an unnecessary elite indulgence, like caviar or electric ice cube makers.”

“Hobbits do not like heights, and do not sleep upstairs, even when they have any stairs.”

“If once one has recognised the truth and seen it, you know that it is the truth and that there is no other and there cannot be, whether you are asleep or awake.”

“REM sleep has also been shown to be particularly important for enhancing our ability to retain emotional memories and for allowing the hippocampus to turn short-term memories of the day before into long-term ones (i.e., it helps make memories more permanent, leading to structural change in the brain).”

“She crept back into the silent house, past the closed bedroom door inside which the other mother and the other father [...] what? she wondered. Slept? Waited?”

“Is that what death would feel like? The nicest, warmest, heaviest never-ending nap? If that’s what it’s like, I wouldn’t mind. If that’s what dying is like, I wouldn’t mind that at all.”

“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?”

“When I was supposed to be awake, I was asleep. When I was supposed to sleep, I was silent. When a pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it.”

“Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.”

“He had no money and no home; he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books...The books were the closest things he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.”

“I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.”

“I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand & the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep & there are no words for that.”

“I made a very important discovery at Camp Currie. Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more. All the wealthy, unhappy people you’ve ever met take sleeping pills; Mobile Infantrymen don’t need them. Give a cap trooper a bunk and time to sack out in it, and he’s as happy as a worm in an apple—asleep.”

“Goodnight stars Goodnight air Goodnight noises everywhere”

“Your mind will keep you up at night, make you cry, destroy you over and over again. You need to convince your mind that it has to let go…because your heart already knows how to heal.”

“When asked what he recalls of his first six years, Michael said, ‘Going for days having to drink water to get full. Going to other people’s houses and asking for something to eat. Sleeping outside. The mosquitoes.‘”

“When you sleep, your dream world is as real to you as life, isn’t it?”

“If men only felt about death as they do about sleep, all terrors would cease. . . Men sleep contentedly, assured that they will wake the following morning. They should feel the same about their lives.”

“Today I’m five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I’m changed to five, abracadabra. Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero. ‘Was I minus numbers?‘”

“If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep”

“Weren’t we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of our neighbor’s children?”

“He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn’t owe too much money.”

“You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was...”

“Why do we breathe air? Because we love air? Because we don’t want to suffocate. Why do we eat? Because we don’t want to starve. How do I know I love her? Because I can sleep after I talk to her.”

“One of the sweetest fruits of victory, after sleep and looting, must be the chance to ignore no-parking signs.”

“He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”

“For May will have no sluggardry at night, Season that pricks in every gentle heart, Awaking it from sleep, and bids it start”

“Sleep is good,” he said. “And books are better.”

“When the princess awoke from the sweetest of sleeps, she found her nurse bending over her, the housekeeper looking over the nurse’s shoulder, and the laundry-maid looking over the housekeeper’s.”

“Death carries off a man who is gathering flowers and whose mind is distracted, as a flood carries off a sleeping village.”

“The alarm shakes the bedside table. Without opening her eyes, Elisa feels for the clock’s ice-cold stopper. She’d been in a deep, soft, warm dream and wanted it back, one more tantalizing minute. But the dream eludes wakeful pursuit; it always does. There was water, dark water-that much she remembers. Tons of it, pressing at her, only she didn’t drown. She breathed inside it better, in fact, than she does here, in waking life, in drafty rooms, in cheap food, in sputtering electricity.”

“I had a dream about you last night... You replaced all the people in your life with kittens. It felt more like a prediction of the future.”

“I had a dream about you last night. We moved into a cabin in the countryside. I couldn’t handle the spiders. You couldn’t handle my drama. I moved back to the city.”

“I had a dream about you last night... You tried to propose with a digital ceramic heater.”

“I had a dream about you last night... Unfortunately, it wasn’t a dream.”

“I had a dream about you last night... you were a giant slinky and I watched you fall down the stairs.”

“I had a dream about you. You were lost in a daydream, when I walked in and you began screaming. But I know that could never actually happen. In real life I only enter people’s nightmares.”

“I had a dream about you last night. The champagne was non-alcoholic. You didn’t notice, and laughed at my jokes anyway.”

“I had a dream about you last night.. you were holding a pine cone and introducing him as Gerald.”

“I had a dream about you last night. I could fly. I was going to use this power to impress you, but you were too heavy to carry, so I won you over with my personality instead.”

“I had a dream about you last night... I was a brick and you were a blanket. Damn that improbability drive.”

“I had a dream about you last night. Eons ago, we created a Universe, then sat back and watched miniature versions of ourselves try to make all the same mistakes we did.”

“I had a dream about you last night... you were there.”

“I had a dream about you last night... you kept meowing at people and licking yourself it was not unlike you normally.”

“It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning.”

“A king does not abide within his tent while his men bleed and die upon the field. A king does not dine while his men go hungry, nor sleep when they stand at watch upon the wall. A king does not command his men’s loyalty through fear nor purchase it with gold; he earns their love by the sweat of his own back and the pains he endures for their sake.”

“One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.”

Yoga Sutra I.5–6: Vrttayah pancatayyah klistaklistah pramana viparyaya vikalpa nidra smrtayah Translation: There are five functions or activities of the mind, which can either cause us problems or not. They are: correct perception, misunderstanding, imagination, deep sleep, and memory.

“That’s all I seem to do now. I have to work to keep you alive, to feed you. I haven’t smiled once since you were born. Go to sleep.”

“That’s the thing about crying yourself to sleep. When you wake up, the problems are still there.”

My dad held me up to look at her. ‘It’s like being asleep,’ he whispered, but she looked no more asleep than a piece of lumbar. She looked dead as a doornail.”

“I had noticed before that to sleep, actually sleep with someone did give this sense of intimacy, as though your dreams had flowed out of you to mingle with theirs and fold you both in a blanket of unconscious knowing. A throwback of some kind, I thought… it was an act of trust to sleep in the presence of another person. If the trust was mutual, simple sleep could bring you closer together than the joining of bodies.”

″‘I know. It’s funny; when he came in, I told him to sit down. He did. And in less than two seconds he was asleep. Then he gave that yell you heard and . . .’ ‘Heart attack?’ ‘Yes.’ The psychiatrist rubbed his cheek thoughtfully, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I guess there are worse ways to go. At least he died peacefully.‘”

″‘I’ve read the first paragraph of that book,’ he said. ‘Why do you suppose I haven’t slept for a week?’ I said, ‘Well?’ and he smiled a curious, twisted smile. ‘It’s a cookbook,’ he said.”

“When he’s done, he’ll probably want to take a nap.”

“You’ll have to fix up a little box for him with a blanket and a pillow. He’ll crawl in, make himself comfortable and fluff the pillow a few times. He’ll probably ask you to read him a story.”

″‘This might sound odd,’ said the Princess. ‘But I think you need another mattress. I felt like I was sleeping on a lump as big as a bowling ball.‘”

“I am not asking you. I’m telling you. You are coming home with me, and you are going to sleep in my room, which is going to be your room—and I don’t care if you sleep on the floor or the windowsill or what—but you are going to sleep there and not here.”

“The purple crayon dropped on the floor. And Harold dropped off to sleep. ”

“A wakeful flea on a slumbering mouse on a snoozing car on a dozing dog on a dreaming child on a snoring granny on a cozy bed in a napping house, where everyone is sleeping.”

“She always slept with her feet on the pillow and her head far down under the covers. ‘That’s the way they sleep in Guatemala,’ she explained. ‘And it’s the only right way to do it. This way, I can wiggle my toes while I’m sleeping, too.‘”

“And in that house there is a bed, a cozy bed in a napping house, where everyone is sleeping.”

“And on that bed there is a granny, a snoring granny on a cozy bed in a napping house, where everyone is sleeping.”

“Llama llama red pajama gets two kissed from his mama, snuggles pillow soft and deep...”

“There is a house, a napping house, where everyone is sleeping.”

“And on that dog there is a cat, a snoozing cat on a dozing dog on a dreaming child on a snoring granny”

“And on that cat there is a mouse, a slumbering mouse”

“And on that granny there is a child, a dreaming child on a snoring granny”

″ Good night, little girls! Thank the lord you are well! And now go to sleep!”

“Now it is night. Night is not a time for play. It is time for sleep. The dogs go to sleep. They will sleep all night.”

“But Little Bear didn’t say anything, for he had gone to sleep, warm and safe in Big Bears arms.”

“The children were nestled all snug in their beds; While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;”

“They didn’t know being dead is only being asleep, and you’re bound to wake up somewhere or other, either where you go to sleep or some better place.”

“Everyday Olivia is supposed to take a nap.”

“Night followed day and day followed night over and over again. Sylvester on the hill woke up less and less often. When he was awake, he was only hopeless and unhappy.”

“Mrs. Duncan sat down on the rock. The warmth of his own mother sitting on him woke Sylvester up from his deep winter sleep.”

“When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter, I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.”

“Little Bear tried and tried and tried to go to sleep, but he couldn’t.′

“Soon Marc called out for his mom again. ‘I’m afraid I’ll fall out of bed’, he told her. ‘Don’t worry my love,’ his mom answered. ‘I’ll fix that, and soon you’ll drift off to sleep.’ ”

“Marc wanted to go to sleep. Really, he did. But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t sleep. ”

″‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;”

“Some of you chaps should go home and take naps.”

“– Why are you always saying Uhm? Can’t you say anything more? ‘Of course I do,’ said the owl, ‘but I don’t feel like it.’ I was sleeping. – Oh my God! Exclaimed the duck. – How can you sleep in broad daylight? Nobody can!”

“Sleeping on Tar Beach was magical. Lying on the roof in the night, with stars and skyscraper buildings all around me, made me feel rich, like I owned all that I could see.”

“Down by the river in the heat of the day the crocodile sleeps and awaits his prey.”

″ One wild winter night she drifts off to sleep. As she dreams peacefully of bygone days, Butch Aggie stirs, hackles raised, hearing strange noises.”

“Swimming along, sometimes at great speed, sometimes slowly and leisurely, sometimes resting and exchanging ideas, sometimes stopping to sleep, it took them a week to reach Amos’s home shore. During that time, they developed a deep admiration for one another. Boris admired the delicacy, the quivering daintiness, the light touch, the small voice, the gemlike radiance of the mouse. Amos admired the bulk, the grandeur, the power, the purpose, the rich voice, and the abounding friendliness of the whale.”

“In his small house at the other side of the wood, Mr. Tickle was asleep. You didn’t know that there was such a thing as a Tickle, did you? Well, there is!”

“All night they slept as though in their beds at home. They dreamed happy dreams. The light lay still and warm over them, murmuring like a give of bees.”

“Sometimes at night, as Mr. Grinling lay sleeping in his warm bed, the ships would toot to tell him that his light was shining brightly and clearly out to sea.”

“Then he goes upstairs and sleeps all day in a comfortable stolen bed.”

“Thomas was a cheeky little engine, too. He thought no engine worked as hard as he did. So he used to play tricks on them. He liked best of all to come quietly beside a big engine dozing on the siding and make him jump.”

“And when I was asleep I had one of my favorite dreams… And in the dream nearly everyone on the earth is dead.”

“Did you ever hear of Mickey, how he heard a racket in the night and shouted, ‘Quiet down there!’ and fell through the dark, out his clothes, past the moon & his mama & papa sleeping tight into the light of the night kitchen?”

“Flowers can get brown and dried out when they die, and lose their petals, whereas people usually get pale and a bit more yellow than normal. They might look as if they’re sleeping.”

“Alfie feels like laughing out loud. Daddy looks so funny laying there sleeping. Alfie takes a blanket and tucks it in around Daddy.”

“They walked the whole day over the meadows, fields, and stony places; and when it rained the little sister said: ‘Heaven and our hearts are weeping together.’ In the evening they came to a large forest, and they were so weary with sorrow and hunger and the long walk, that they lay down in the hollow tree and fell asleep.”

“And NOW Alfie can sleep, too. Shhh….Quiet! It looks as if he’s sleeping. Yes, look! Now he’s sleeping. Good night, Alfie Atkins!”

“That’s quite absurd! You have merely to go to bed and blow out the candle. It is very difficult sometimes to keep awake, especially at church, but there is no difficulty at all about sleeping. Why, even babies know how to do that, and they are not very clever.”

So Johnny begins the life of a stroller - begging on the street, sleeping where he can.

“Just as he was looking to see if he had anything left to eat, something hit him on the head. It was a tangerine. He had been sleeping right under a tree full of big, fat tangerines.”

“Of course, Darbishire was his best friend, and best friends are different. It would hardly be fair, he decided, to let a decent chap like old Darbi snooze away the precious minutes of a red-letter day like this.”

“It was dark when I heard it. I’d been asleep. God knows how. I guess it was my mind’s way of denying reality. Anyway, I woke up suddenly and there was this awful noise; a sort of moaning, and a shuffling sound outside the bunker.”

“But by now Marcovaldo’s sleep had reached a zone where sounds no longer arrived, and these, even so graceless and rasping, came is if muffled in a soft halo, perhaps because of the very consistency of the garbage packed into the trucks. ”

“He wasn’t good for much, that boy. His chief delight was to eat and sleep; and after that–he liked best to make mischief.”

“In those dreams Mudge was alone and Henry was alone.”

‘Good morning, Little Brown Bear,’ says Mama. ‘Did you sleep well?”

“But this is no time for sleeping. Baloo knows it; I know it; the Pack know it; and even the foolish, foolish deer know. Tabaqui has told thee too.”