Sleep Quotes

“Dark circles under my eyes sink deeper and deeper into my skull, in contrast to my pale skin there is an undeniable resemblance to a fresh corpse.”
― Dee Remy

“It's the smell of him in the bathroom, all I need to get ready for the day. Watching him get dressed, and the sound in the kitchen; a slow hum of a song and his movements, picking things to eat. The way I could observe him, for hours, just go on with his day – or as he sleeps – simply breathing in and out, in and out, and it's like the hymn that sings me to peace.
I know the world is still out there and I know I'm not yet friendly to its pace, but as long as I know him with me, here, there, somewhere – us – I know I have a chance.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“there is some aching
that will only heal...
in the mosque of sleep.”
― Sanober Khan, Turquoise Silence

“Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small and having a child's need for sleep.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Burning Secret and other stories

“I really like it when a bad dream doesn't scare you...it inspires you instead'.”
― Fwah Storm

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting...”
― William Wordsworth, The Major Works

“I had a dream about you. I was a ventriloquist trying to share your fashion secrets, but you wouldn’t talk. So we put on a strip show for the department store sale, and I was arrested for theft – I took away your dignity as a mannequin”
― Bauvard, I Had a Dream About You

“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.”
― Theodore Roethke, Words for the Wind: The Collected Verse

“Do not be alarmed if they look paler than the other maidens of Greece. They are scarcely of this Earth, and seem to be shaking off the sleep of a past life.”
― Charles Nodier, Smarra & Trilby

“Ich möchte schlafen, aber du mußt tanzen."

[Hyazinthen]”
― Theodor Storm, Gedichte

“I feel like I'm sleeping when I'm awake, and really living when I'm asleep.”
― Michael J. White

“For several days, I slept. Whether this was a necessary part of physical recovery, or a stubborn retreat from waking reality, I do not know, but I woke only reluctantly to take a little food, falling at once back into a stupor of oblivion, as though the small, warm weight of broth in my stomach were an anchor that pulled me after it, down through the murky fathoms of sleep.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber

“What an odd thing a stranger is. A stranger sleeping next to you. I listen to his breathing as if it were his entire life, with its hidden processes, the pulsing of the blood in the tissues, with thousands of tiny hidden decays and combustions, which together create and maintain him.”
― Mihail Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years

“Life is too ironic to fully understand. It takes sadness to know what happiness is. Noise to appreciate silence & absence to value presence.”
― Abhysheq Shukla, KARMA

“It's the oasis," said the camel driver.
"Well, why don't we go there right now?" the boy asked.
"Because we have to sleep.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“I lay in bed that night, a first-time drunkard at seven years of age, pondering the punishment I knew would arrive on callused palms. In the forest, as if sensing my plight, wolves howled nocturnal laments. The magnificent lunar lullabies of my lupine brethren wooed me into a deep and cleansing sleep.”
― Mark Rice, Metallic Dreams

“Though her emotions had not deviated from a jittery frailty she knew that in her own room she could at least attempt sleep and that if she dreamed she might then finally be with Henry.”
― Anna Godbersen, Rumors

“Parfois, tu rêves que le sommeil est une morte lente qui te gagne, une anestésie douce et terrible à la fois, une nécrose heureuse : le froid monte le long de tes jambes, le long de tes bras, monte lentement, t'engourdit, t'annihile.
Ton orteil est une montagne lointaine, ta jambe un fleuve, ta joue est ton oreiller, tu loges tout entier dans ton pouce, tu fonds, tu coules comme du sable, comme du mercure.”
― Georges Perec, Un homme qui dort

“It is not the dream of what you're feeling laziness, if not, the sleep of exhaustion.”
― Edmundo de Amicis, Coração

“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!”
― H.C. Artmann, Contemporary Surrealist Prose Volume 1

“Every day, I want to sleep in your arms and wake up by your side in the mornings.”
― Jagdish Joghee, A Stranger by the Stream: Most Times We Find Love. Sometimes, Love Finds You.

“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

“Anna woke with the wonderful feeling bad sleepers have when they know they have slept well. As if they have stolen something and got away with it. At these times the memories of what led up to such deep sleep keep their distance for a few seconds and those few seconds are perhaps the only time the world can ever be said to show mercy.”
― James Meek, The People's Act of Love

“I had a dream about you. You were wearing Sylvester Stallone's sneer as pants, but his lips were saggy on your legs, so you had to wear a mustache as a belt.
”
― Dora J. Arod, I Had a Dream About You

“He had to take sleep by surprise. Preparing for bed simply alerted insomnia, brought all the busy thoughts, the renegade remorses and guilts and recriminations.”
― William Browning Spencer, Zod Wallop

“The sleeping pills in her pillowcase, the dark blank in her blanket, her purse lips purple; she disappears, she disappears. Her fears cuddle warm beside, to tears that went dry in the beat of her heart's drum. The strum, strum, stern in her veins, she breaks free finally floating to her lost rhythm of peace.”
― Anthony Liccione

“I had a dream about you. We were ice fishing in my freezer. I caught a few cold beers, and you wondered if we should drink them, or throw them back because they were babies.
”
― Dora J. Arod, I Had a Dream About You

“Because to him, who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of the dim wisdoms old and deep
That God gives unto man in sleep”
― W.B. Yeats, When You Are Old: Early Poems and Fairy Tales

“I had a dream about you. You looked like you, but you also looked like a mannequin. And I looked like me, but I also looked like a mannequin. Between the two of us, we were too fake even for Hollywood. And as such, we were forced to reside in Washington DC.
”
― Dark Jar Tin Zoo, I Had a Dream About You

“I'm going to bed now, Lovis! Not to sleep. But to think and to curse, and woe better anyone who disturbs me!”
― Astrid Lindgren, Ronia, the Robber's Daughter