"Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight."
— Phyllis Diller

"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"
— Ernest Hemingway

"Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"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."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry.

Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on."
— Ray Bradbury (Green Shadows, White Whale: A Novel of Ray Bradbury's Adventures Making Moby Dick with John Huston in Ireland)

"90

Even a soul submerged in sleep
is hard at work and helps
make something of the world.

(translated by Brooks Haxton)"
— Heraclitus (Fragments)

"Did you sleep well?"
"No, I made a couple of mistakes."
— Steven Wright

"What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams."
— Werner Herzog

"People say, 'I'm going to sleep now,' as if it were nothing. But it's really a bizarre activity. 'For the next several hours, while the sun is gone, I'm going to become unconscious, temporarily losing command over everything I know and understand. When the sun returns, I will resume my life.'

If you didn't know what sleep was, and you had only seen it in a science fiction movie, you would think it was weird and tell all your friends about the movie you'd seen.

'They had these people, you know? And they would walk around all day and be OK? And then, once a day, usually after dark, they would lie down on these special platforms and become unconscious. They would stop functioning almost completely, except deep in their minds they would have adventures and experiences that were completely impossible in real life. As they lay there, completely vulnerable to their enemies, their only movements were to occasionally shift from one position to another; or, if one of the 'mind adventures' got too real, they would sit up and scream and be glad they weren't unconscious anymore. Then they would drink a lot of coffee.'

So, next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you're in a science fiction movie. And whisper, 'The creature is regenerating itself.'"
— George Carlin (Brain Droppings)

"She used to say she could taste sleep and that it was as delicious as a BLT on fresh French bread."
— Rebecca Wells (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood)

"Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, And yet a third of life is passed in sleep."
— George Gordon Byron

"“I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That’s why I’m trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning.”"
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"A person who has not done one half his day's work by ten o'clock, runs a chance of leaving the other half undone."
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

"I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed."
— David Benioff (City of Thieves)

"Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep."
— Fran Lebowitz

"I'll never wake up in a good mood again.
I'm tired of these stinky boots"
— Jim Morrison (Jim Morrison's an American Prayer)

"Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off."
— Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn)

"What hath night to do with sleep?"
— John Milton

"A successful song comes to sing itself inside the listener. It is cellular and seismic, a wave coalescing in the mind and in the flesh. There is a message outside and a message inside, and those messages are the same, like the pat and thud of two heartbeats, one within you, one surrounding. The message of the lullaby is that it’s okay to dim the eyes for a time, to lose sight of yourself as you sleep and as you grow: if you drift, it says, you’ll drift ashore: if you fall, you will fall into place."
— Kevin Brockmeier

"I love sleep because it is both pleasant and safe to use. Pleasant because one is in the best possible company and safe because sleep is the consummate protection against the unseemliness that is the invariable consequence of being awake. What you don't know won't hurt you. Sleep is death without the responsibility."
— Fran Lebowitz (Metropolitan Life/Social Studies)

"On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges."
— Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)

"It was one of those moments of perfect tiredness, of having conquered not only the work at hand, but the night who had blocked the way."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That’s why I’m trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught."
— Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room)

"Eat healthily, sleep well, breathe deeply, move harmoniously."
— Jean-Pierre Barral

"He awoke, opened his eye. The room meant very little to him; he was too deeply immersed in the non-being from which he had just come. If he had not the energy to ascertain his position in time and space, he also lacked the desire. ... In utter comfort, utter relaxation he lay absolutely still for a while, and then sank back into on the the light momentary sleeps that occur after a long, profound one."
— Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky)

"“You never know. Maybe when we’re dreaming…we’re more lucid than when we are awake.”"
— Katherine Angela Yeboah (Lucid)

"Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone. "
— Anthony Burgess

"North," said the face beneath the sheet. "I belong to the National Association of Broadcasting Employees and Technicians. If you wake me up before I've slept twelve hours, I get paid short turnaround."

"But Rose--"

"If you wake me up before seven hours, I get to push a screwdriver into your lungs."

— from "The Scarred Man"
— Andrew Klavan

"Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night."
— Charles Fisher

"If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!"
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Night Flight)

"If one believed in angels one would feel that they must love us best when we are asleep and cannot hurt each other; and what a mercy it is that once in every twenty-four hours we are too utterly weary to go on being unkind."
— Elizabeth von Arnim (The Solitary Summer)

"They slept profoundly, desperately, greedily, as though for the last time, as though they had been condemned to stay awake forever and had to drink in all the sleep in the world during these last hours. "
— Hermann Hesse (Narcissus and Goldmund)

"The habit is now confirmed in me of spending the greater part of the day in sleep, while by night I wander far and wide through the city under the sedative influence of a tincture which has become necessary to my life"
— Matthew Phipps Shiel (Xelucha and Others)

"How can non-existence get sick of itself?

Everytime you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning waking with something else, something quite impossible even to think about. We don't even have the instrument to do it, because our mind & our world are the same thing."
— Victor Pelevin (Babylon)

"There was no sleeper more elegant than she, with her curved body posed for a dance and her hand across her forehead, but there was also no one more ferocious when anyone disturbed the sensuality of her thinking she was still asleep when she no longer was."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"You ever notice how long it takes for things to happen when you know they're supposed to happen? My fake Walkman has a built-in alarm, and I set it for two in the morning and wear the headphones to bed, but before you can wake up you have to fall asleep, and I never DO fall asleep because I keep waiting for the alarm to go off."
— Rodman Philbrick (Freak the Mighty)

"I crave the sweet surrender of sleep and my dreams' uncensored communication: no tiresome small talk, sucking up to impress, or tiptoeing around charged topics. Dreams are the naked truth; get ready for it."
— Judith Orloff

"Several people toss and turn in their sleep, startled by the lines of the newspapers in their dreams, knives out, lights out, lights out, knives out!"
— Hans Carl Artmann (Contemporary Surrealist Prose Volume 1)

"Maybe you should be a more aggressive sleeper."
— ElixisJade

"He slept like an animal, well and lightly, faced in the opposite direction from that of a man; for a man going to sleep is about to escape into it while animals are prepared to escape out of it."
— Theodore Sturgeon (More than Human)

"It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this."
— Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)

"How can non-existence get sick of itself?

Everytime you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning waking with something else, something quite impossible even to think about. We don't even have the instrument to so it, because our mind & our world are the same thing."
— Victor Pevelin