Quotes on Bedtime

Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.

And if tonight my soul may find her peace in sleep, and sink in good oblivion, and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.

American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.

At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.

The bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret; we make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late.

Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind.

But love, I’ve come to understand, is more than three words mumbled before bedtime. Love is sustained by action, a pattern of devotion in the things we do for each other every day.

Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.

It's a cruel season that makes you get ready for bed while it's light out.

Suggested remedy for the common cold: A good gulp of whiskey at bedtime-it's not very scientific, but it helps.

Ah, music," he said, wiping his eyes. "A magic far beyond all we do here! And now, bedtime. Off you trot!

The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.

I started to write as a child as soon as I could read, or even before, when my mother read me Beatrix Potter at bedtime. Writing seemed to me to be the only sensible way to live and be happy.

It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.

Now, blessings light on him that first invented sleep!Ê It covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; it is meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot.Ê It is the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap, and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise man, even.

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

I was told bedtime stories by my father or my grandmother. Books, I mostly read on my own in bed.

Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.