quotations about sleep
It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be.
JERRY SPINELLI
Stargirl
Sleep is not a waste of time. During sleep, a variety of biological processes take place that restore our bodies and minds.
NANCY FOLDVARY-SCHAEFER
Getting a Good Night's Sleep
Sleep is a god too proud to wait in palaces, and yet so humble too as not to scorn the meanest country cottages.
ABRAHAM COWLEY
The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley
Oh sleep awhile, and stop the wheels of fate.
I think that there is privilege in woe,
And sorrow may not seize us everywhere,
And havoc doth not hunt where'er he list,
And sleep is halcyon time when griefs are still.
SYDNEY THOMPSON DOBELL
Balder
Sleep is the salutary bath that renovates life, the entire being growing younger under its influence; it is a station in the desert of this world; and often, after dull and wearying journeys, one comes to repose in this oasis prepared by divine Providence, enabled the next day to pursue the route with renewed courage and activity.
ANONYMOUS
"Early Rising", Catholic World, vol. 5
One truly ought to enter upon sleep as into a strange, fair chapel. Fragrant and melodious antechamber of the unseen, sleep is a novitiate for the beyond.
EDWARD THOMAS
"Autumn Thoughts", Atlantic Monthly, September 1902
Care-charming Sleep, thou easer of all woes,
Brother to Death, sweetly thyself dispose.
JOHN FLETCHER
The Tragedy of Valentinian
Sleep is a skilled magician, it changes the proportions of things, the distances between them, it separates people and they're lying next to each other, brings them together and they can barely see one another.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
The Tale of the Unknown Island
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
THEODORE ROETHKE
"The Waking", Collected Poems
Sleeping people are so remote.... Right here, but out of communication. That's what strikes humans as uncanny about sleep. Its utter privacy. The sleeper turns his back on everyone.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
While the city sleeps
Men are dreaming
A world enlightened
Beyond this darkest age
CHICAGO
"While the City Sleeps"
Eat, sleep, rave, repeat
FATBOY SLIM
"Eat Sleep Rave Repeat"
Sleep is God. Go worship.
JIM BUTCHER
Death Masks
I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live.
SYLVIA PLATH
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Sleep. To lie down and shut out the noise, the fear, the unceasing misery.
TAD WILLIAMS
Otherland: City of Golden Shadow
May the merciful gods, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Hypnos"
Thus, sleep is a refreshing shower
To man's body, soul, and mind;
Nature's mysterious remedy
In potations, sweet and kind.
Could we ever keep on journeying
Through the bitter ills of life,
If there were no peacefulness in sleep,
No tonic to sweeten strife?
VENELIA R. CASE
Grange Poems
Waking is strife; sleep is the truce of God!
HENRY VAN DYKE
"The House of Rimmon"
Sleep is the gift of many spiders
The webs tie down the sleepers easy.
CARL SANDBURG
"Drowsy"
There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes , which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it, and enable it to ramble as it pleases. So far as an overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter inability to control our thoughts or power of motion can be called sleep, this is it; and yet we have a consciousness of all that is going on about us, and even if we dream, words which are really spoken, or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost a matter of impossibility to separate the two.
CHARLES DICKENS
Oliver Twist