Quotes on Insomnia

It is tempting to think of this form of insomnia, the inability to fall asleep, as a disease of agency and control: the inability to relinquish high self-reflexive consciousness for the vulnerable, ignorant regions of slumber in which we know not what we do.

Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night!

You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel-a hunger and thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of thoughts leading nowhere, spinning round swift and steady.

A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.

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

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.

A disruption of the circadian cycle—the metabolic and glandular rhythms that are central to our workaday life—seems to be involved in many, if not most, cases of depression; this is why brutal insomnia so often occurs and is most likely why each day’s pattern of distress exhibits fairly predictable alternating periods of intensity and relief.

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.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.

When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.

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.

O sleep! O gentle sleep! Nature's soft nurse.

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.

Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.

On some nights, he has nowhere to sleep, on others he suffers from insomnia. "That's just how it is," thinks the warrior. "I was the one who chose to walk this path."

What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?

What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights!