Sleep Donation Quotes

“It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively,... and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“People are symptoms of dreams”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“And I feel certain there must be a second set of laws, inscrutable but real, that governs exactly how much a particular individual can give to and receive from another. Some hydrology of human generosity. Because there are these gifts we can make to one another freely, reflexively, with no sting of loss; and there are gifts we fight to relinquish, beg to get.”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“Hundreds of our old neighbors, friends, coworkers, and teachers are new insomniacs. They file for dream bankruptcy, appeal for Slumber Corps aid, wait to be approved for a sleep donor. It is a special kind of homelessness, says our mayor, to be evicted from your dreams. I believe our mayor is both genuinely concerned for his insomniac constituency, and also pandering to a powerfully desperate new voting block.”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“Doesn't it matter how you ask the question? Or if the tone of your request is closer to a fist than to an open palm? Can the nature of the request corrupt the purity of the gift, the donated sleep?”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“Words, I guess, are her more durable artifacts.”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“el mañana, una red de luz amarillismo y sombra azul que se extiende desde la cama hasta la puerta".”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“A volte penso che il dottore giusto saprebbe aprirmi il petto e trovarla lì, mia sorella, incastonata dentro di me, come un viso su un medaglione”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“I have worked with many people in this waking life who seem congenitally incapable of accepting any human donation of blood, marrow, sleep, criticism, praise, money, or love. Some days, I know, I'm one of them. You find that you're not a match with the donor. Or you sense that the gift will take some freedom from you. Your body rebels, maybe you don't even know why. But the donation is rejected.”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“Time, as our species has lived it on this planet, will cease to exist. No more dark/light binary. No more active red daytime, blue evening dissolving. No longer is sunshine the coagulant of consciousness, causing us to clot into personalities, to cohere once more on our pillows each morning.”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“eschatological manipulation”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“I don't even want to try to understand it, and so begin to mistake it for something else after that, paling shadows of this original feeling, something inaudibly delicate that would not survive the passage into speech.”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“It is a special kind of homelessness, says our mayor, to be evicted from your dreams.”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“America’s great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively, to a body like mine, and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“He was intelligent and healthy, but decent to a point that crippled him as a master of his home or an accumulator of wealth. Madelaine had once characterized him as standing on the edge of the mainstream of life, smiling and saying, "Pardon me," "After you,"and "No, thank you.”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“Granted, we never gave you a choice, but wouldn’t you have agreed to transfer those dreams to us, knowing now what you could not know then? This sort of subjunctive calculus, nobody teaches in school. Artificial sleep, for example, “sleep for all”—who can say if we will achieve it? I keep roto-dialing strangers, begging for their surplus unconsciousness.”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“The body can be a marvel of resiliency, a cactus when it comes to sleep - capable of surviving on mere drops.”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“We've been working out of our tin can for half a decade. Nobody suggests moving into a brick-and-mortar office; nobody wants to peer through glass windows, in a building with a foundation, and admit that the insomnia emergency is now a permanent condition.”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“She’s dead. She’s dead.”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“As dizzy as the stars, as near and alone.”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation