Sleepless Quotes

“I've tried acupuncture. An old Chinese doctor stuck needles in my skeptical ankle and told me to lie down. The table was hard. I was cold. I fell asleep immediately. When he woke me twenty minutes later, I was astonished. Unfortunately, this extraordinary result had absolutely no impact on my ability to sleep at night. He would have to have come every evening and jabbed needles in my ankle.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless: A Memoir of Insomnia

“We know more about Proust's asthma than his insomnia, and yet the two go together—along with his anorexia.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless: A Memoir of Insomnia

“What will we miss when the last orangutan is dead? A way of being? Gestures. A certain relationship with trees. Unique hands, which pick up things in a way our hands don’t: a different type of contact. And those eyes contemplating the world. What we will also miss is their invitation: to ask ourselves who they are; and so to ask ourselves who we are. This movement towards them extends us, creates space within us, creates dreaming. Their presence elevates us. Their disappearance diminishes us. ‘There are some people who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless

“The annihilation of space by time: Marx predicted it, Amazon enabled it.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless

“Basque people are travellers. They fold the world over on itself, which creates hems, hollows, new shapes.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless

“Alas! the grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful – but, like the Demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep, or they will devour us – they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless

“Insomnia is one of the spiralled forms of anxiety. In the bottomless room, the walls pulsate. They move away and they come closer. They shed their molecules in a shower. A black cloud fills the black air. I breathe in the atoms of the walls. I become those atoms. As the night is pulverized, it grinds me up. I am kneaded into the material from which black holes are made, I dissolve in the antimatter of the underside of the world.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless

“Anything is preferable to permanent wakefulness, to that criminal absence of forgetfulness…’ In this ‘vertiginous lucidity’, having a break from oneself, even for a few hours, is an impossible dream.38”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless