Quotes About Insomnia

“The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.”
― Poppy Z. Brite

“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

“I only sleep with people I love, which is why I have insomnia.”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

“Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?"

"I give."

"You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.”
― Leonard Cohen

“Why can I never go back to bed? Who's is the voice ringing in my head? Where is the sense in these desperate dreams? Why should I wake when I'm half past dead?”
― Emilie Autumn

“It's a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.”
― Tracy Chevalier

“That's the advantage of insomnia. People who go to be early always complain that the night is too short, but for those of us who stay up all night, it can feel as long as a lifetime. You get a lot done”
― Banana Yoshimoto, N.P.

“I think insomnia is a sign that a person is interesting.”
― Avery Sawyer, Notes to Self

“He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Clean Well Lighted Place

“I've crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I've come to a place I never thought I'd have to come to. And I don't know how I got here. It's a strange place. It's a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“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

“O sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature's soft nurse, how have I frightened thee, 1710. That thou no more will weigh my eyelids down, And steep my senses in forgetfulness?”
― William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2

“sleep is such a luxury, which i cant afford.”
― Robin Sikarwar

“In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.”
― Colette

“I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness that I'd practically invented”
― Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby

“But [Pooh] couldn't sleep. The more he tried to sleep the more he couldn't. He tried counting Sheep, which is sometimes a good way of getting to sleep, and, as that was no good, he tried counting Heffalumps. And that was worse. Because every Heffalump that he counted was making straight for a pot of Pooh's honey, and eating it all. For some minutes he lay there miserably, but when the five hundred and eighty-seventh Heffalump was licking its jaws, and saying to itself, "Very good honey this, I don't know when I've tasted better," Pooh could bear it no longer.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Icehenge

“Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“I am strongly of the opinion that, after the age of twenty-one, a man ought not to be out of bed and awake at four in the morning. The hour breeds thought. At twenty-one, life being all future, it may be examined with impunity. But, at thirty, having become an uncomfortable mixture of future and past, it is a thing to be looked at only when the sun is high and the world full of warmth and optimism.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“Am I sleeping? Have I slept at all? This is insomnia.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Insomnia

I cannot get to sleep tonight.
I toss and turn and flop.
I try to count some fluffy sheep
while o'er a fence they hop.
I try to think of pleasant dreams
of places really cool.
I don't know why I cannot sleep -
I slept just fine at school.”
― Kathy Kenney-Marshall

“Sleep comes more easily than it returns.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.”
― Fleur Adcock

“When it becomes really impossible to get away and sleep, then the will to live evaporates of its own accord.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

“I feel as though whenever I create something, my Mr. Hyde wakes up in the middle of the night and starts thrashing it. I sometimes love it the next morning, but other times it is an abomination.”
― Criss Jami

“I felt very bad and could not sleep until 1am. Maybe he could coach me defence.”
― Tamim Iqbal

“I fix the cramped, lined pages
with my curious stare. How do you
come to exist?”
― Kiera Woodhull, Chaos of the Mind

“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.”
― Eleanor Hallowell Abbott, Molly Make-Believe