Insomnia Quotes

Insomnia is his mind's revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during the daylight hours. ~ Alain De Botton

Insomnia doesn't let you sleep or be awake
It just makes you sick
So does LOVE ~ Subhasis Das

There is nothing so entirely desirable in all the world as a few hours oblivion. ~ Anne Reeve Aldrich

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'm 86 and my doctor used to tell me to slow down - at least he did until he dropped dead. ~ Cesar Romero

You can lie awake at night and think; the quality of insomnia depends entirely on what you decide to think of. Can you decide to think? - Yes, you can. ~ Muriel Spark

Life was a perpetual black fuck about a fixed pole of insomnia. ~ Henry Miller

The mania started with insomnia and not eating and being driven, driven to find an apartment, driven to see everybody, driven to do New York, driven to never shut up. ~ Patty Duke

I sometimes suffer from insomnia. And when I can't fall asleep, I play what I call the alphabet game. ~ Roz Chast

Daily life makes us all susceptible to accumulating stress, mostly due to the non-stop demands and pressures of juggling work, home and personal responsibilities. This stress revs up the nervous system, causing the brain to flood the body with hormones that trigger overreacting, irrational thinking, and even insomnia. After years of unavoidable exposure to the stress reaction with no defense, the nervous system can become severely deteriorated, leaving us defenseless against mental or physical illness and disease.iv As it happens, meditation has been proven as one of the greatest counter-stress solutions.v When practiced daily, meditation can help to restore balance and re-supply much-needed rest to your physiology. Common side effects of daily meditation are increased energy and feelings of contentedness and inner happiness.vi ~ Light Watkins

Insomnia of the eyes for other than Your sake is futile,
And their weeping for other than Your loss is wasteful. ~ Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali

There are whole months at a time when my head is so full of ideas that I wake in the middle of the night and lie in the dark telling myself stories. There are also long, dark nights when I just know I'll never write another word: I'm finished, empty, a husk ... Oh dear, yes, twitch, yawn, how I've suffered insomnia for my art. ~ Debi Gliori

We try not using medications initially, and we use something called behavioral therapy for insomnia. This changes behaviors people do in bed, none of the tossing and turning. ~ Shelby Harris

I fix the cramped, lined pages
with my curious stare. How do you
come to exist? ~ Kiera Woodhull

Your dreams may seem impossible to someone with insomnia. ~ Junnita Jackson

Some made the long drop from the apartment or the office window; some took it quietly in two-car garages with the motor running; some used the native tradition of the Colt or Smith and Wesson; those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare, their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clean up. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

A disruption of the circadian cycle - the metabolic and glandular rhythms that are central to our workaday life - seems to be involved in many, if not most, cases of depression; this is why brutal insomnia so often occurs and is most likely why each day's pattern of distress exhibits fairly predictable alternating periods of intensity and relief. ~ William Styron

Unrequited love and insomnia are longtime friends of mine. They might even be siblings - evil and uncaring with sticky fingers. ~ Saffron A. Kent

I think Vegas is the answer for pregnant people because of insomnia. It's open all the time and you go down and play your silly slots. ~ Selma Blair

Bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island. ~ Albert Camus

That ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia. ~ James Joyce

I don't spend sleepless nights over getting very bad reviews. ~ Werner Herzog

I stood at the end of the street, catching snow in my mouth, and laughed softly to myself as I realized that without my insomnia and anxiety and pain I'd never have been awake to see the city that never sleeps asleep and blanketed up for winter. I smiled and felt silly, but in the best possible way. ~ Jenny Lawson

Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head. they were his insomnia, his illness. And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely, but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-poering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word! ~ Milan Kundera

Sooner or later everything you thought you'd left behind comes around again. For good or ill, it comes around again. ~ Stephen King

What are books good for?"
"Hitting intruders?" Nick mumbled. He rubbed his eyes again. "Doorstops. Insomnia. Special interrogation techniques. Silencing bedmates in the middle of the night. ~ Abigail Roux

On another plane, only a brute in a state of irrational fury can imagine that men should be sadistically
tortured in order to obtain their consent. Such an act only accomplishes the subjugation of one man by
another, in an outrageous relationship between persons. The representative of rational totality is content,
on the contrary, to allow the object to subdue the person in the soul of man. The highest mind is first of
all reduced to the level of the lowest by the police technique of joint accusation. Then five, ten, twenty
nights of insomnia will culminate an illusory conviction and will bring yet another dead soul into the
world. From this point of view, the only psychological revolution known to our times since Freud's has
been brought about by the NKVD and the political police in general. Guided by a determinist hypothesis
that calculates the weak points and the degree of elasticity of the soul, these new techniques have once
again thrust aside one of man's limits and have attempted to demonstrate that no individual psychology is
original and that the common measure of all human character is matter. They have literally created the
physics of the soul. ~ Albert Camus

I am convinced that during bouts of insomnia, I have sometimes slept without knowing it. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Come, cuddle your head on my shoulder, dear, your head like the golden rod, and we will go sailing away from here to the beautiful Land Of Nod. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

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

I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting. ~ Mark Twain

I think the most common cause of insomnia is simple; its loneliness. ~ Heath Ledger

The places we are born come back. They disguise themselves as migraines, stomach aches, insomnia. They are the way we sometimes wake falling, fumbling for the bedside lamp, certain everything we've built has gone in the night. We become strangers to the places we are born. They would not recognize us but we will always recognize them. They are marrow to us; they are bred into us. If we were turned inside out there would be maps cut into the wrong side of our skin. Just so we can find our way back. Except, cut wrong side into my skin are not canals and train tracks and a boat, but always: you. ~ Daisy Johnson

Physical activity within four hours of bedtime and illness can also cause this type of insomnia. ~ Alistair Sinclair

there's no way I can sleep in any position with so much still unwritten about the glory of basements, where,
with all the promise in crock pot boxes, small animals go to die, piles of laundry hide the machines, rusted tools fall into other rusted tools giving way to unsung sculpture, soiled playing cards and unmatched socks strewn atop a punched-out screen door make a shaggy parquet; and a famished, leggy fluorescent tube barely winks on the entire scene. ~ Kristen Henderson

If it wasn't for insomnia, I'd never get anything done. ~ Andrew Cormier

Insomnia is a curse most of the time, unless you're by my side.
Because then each waking minute is another I get to spend with you.
I've spoken to you so much throughout this night.
Told you so many things that I would usually be afraid to say.
How much I've missed you.
How much I need you.
But you're here beside me and I'm more relaxed because you are.
You give me confidence to tell you how I truly feel.
To tell you how much you mean to me.
I normally find it hard to express myself because, believe it or not, even one so tough as I gets all mixed up with this feeling of love that grows stronger everyday inside of me.
Love is the only thing on this planet that scares me any more, and it's amazing.
I had no idea I could feel this way about you or anyone.
That's why I've had to tell you how I fell.

I only hope I can tell you all of this when you wake up. ~ Raven Lockwood

Many bad days were preceded by a bad night's sleep. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

...philosophy permits man to interrogate himself about what he says and about what one says to oneself in thinking. No longer to let oneself be swayed or intoxicated by the rhythm of words and the generality that they designate, but to open oneself to the uniqueness of the unique in the real, that is to say, to the uniqueness of the other. That is to say, in the final analysis, to love. To speak truly, not as one sings; to awaken; to sober up; to undo one's refrain. Already the philosopher Alain taught us to be on guard against everything that in our purportedly lucid civilization comes to us from the "merchants of sleep." Philosophy as insomnia, as a new awakening at the heart of the self-evidence which already marks the awakening, but which is still or always a dream. ~ Emmanue Levinas

India's head ached. Insomnia was still her most attentive, cruelest lover, demanding and possessing her selfishly whenever it chose to do so. Light-heartedness was beyond her today. A man of middling quality was trying to marry her, and there was something wrong with her father's voice on the phone. ~ Salman Rushdie

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

Counting your blessings is a better cure for insomnia than counting sheep - you can fall asleep before you get through half of them. ~ Densey Clyne

After a sleepless night the body gets weaker,
It becomes dear and not yours - and nobody's.
Just like a seraph you smile to people
And arrows moan in the slow arteries.
After a sleepless night the arms get weaker
And deeply equal to you are the friend and foe.
Smells like Florence in the frost, and in each
Sudden sound is the whole rainbow.
Tenderly light the lips, and the shadow's golden
Near the sunken eyes. Here the night has sparked
This brilliant likeness - and from the dark night
Only just one thing - the eyes - are growing dark. ~ Marina Tsvetaeva

The kingdom of sleep demands its forfeits, and the world looks very different through eyes cracked and yellow with its denial. ~ Alaya Dawn Johnson

His insomnia was so bad, he couldn't sleep during office hours. ~ Arthur Baer

When I dance with him, one of my great loves, he is absolutely human, and when he turns to dip me or I step on his foot because we are both leading, I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer. The slow dance of what's to come and the slow dance of insomnia pouring across the floor like bath water. ~ Matthew Dickman

But Mr. Hale resolved that he would not be disturbed by any such nonsensical idea; so he lay awake, determining not to think about it. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

When you're in the throes of what feels like all-consuming pain, sleep is respite. It's your last refuge from the unrelenting guerilla attacks carried out against you by your own mind. ~ Shaheen Bhatt

A conscious attempt to fall asleep is sure to produce insomnia, to try to be conscious of one's own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a light directed outward. It's like the headlights on a locomotive - turn them inward and you'd have a crash. ~ Boris Pasternak

She married the prince
and all went well
except for the fear
the fear of sleep.
Briar Rose
was an insomniac ...
She could not nap
or lie in sleep
without the court chemist
mixing her some knock-out drops
and never in the prince's presence. ~ Anne Sexton

Whether ideas like this are inspiration or insomnia, I don't know," he writes in his journal. "I do things by sixth sense." Patton ~ Bill O'Reilly

I know my music is going well when I don't have insomnia. ~ Carly Rae Jepsen

So it went. Bob was increasingly cynical, leery, uneasy; Jesse was increasingly cavalier, merry, moody, fey, unpredictable. If his gross anatomy suggested a strong smith in his twenties, his actual physical constitution was that of a man who was incrementally dying. He was sick with rheums and aches and lung congestions, he tilted against chairs and counters and walls, in cold weather he limped with a cane. He coughed incessantly when lying down, his clever mind was often in conflict, insomnia stained his eye sockets like soot, he seemed in a state of mourning. He counteracted the smell of neglected teeth with licorice and candies, he browned his graying hair with dye, he camouflaged his depressions and derangements with masquerades of extreme cordiality, courtesy, and good will toward others. ~ Ron Hansen

If a woman gets insomnia, you never know where you're going to find her furniture the next morning. It's primal. We have so little we can control, but we can perfect the way our room looks. ~ Nicole Holofcener

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

I originally started it to help me with anxiety & insomnia. It's already made my life waaaaaaaaaaaaaay better & even with my stage fright. Which I used to think there was no cure for ... Last night was the first night I've slept 8 hours naturally in my entire life. I felt the best I have in ages. It's better than any medication or all of the other nonsense I've tried. ~ Sky Ferreira

By any objective measure, the modern business of "psychopharmacology" - the use of drugs to treat everything from anxiety and insomnia to schizophrenia itself - has to be judged a failure. Few patients, if any, are cured. The most violent manifestations of mental illness can be controlled, but with what long-term consequences, no one knows. ~ James Gleick

For years, I had used these fractured men to justify my cynicism and workaholism, and the grief, insomnia and casual anorexia were no longer of any interest to me. ~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

It is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws. ~ Vladimir Lenin

Five a.m. and mooching round
Compartments in my brain
Every corner occupied
By garbage and disdain
Down all day - up all night
Beneath that energy draining light

The Paperboy's Wife ~ John Cooper Clarke

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,

So, sleep deprivation, and sometimes an insomnia, which is a little bit of a different form, but just getting a lack of sleep, can lead to a number of different decrements. ~ Shelby Harris

I still smell your absence on my skin. It smells of insomnia and rusted key locks... ~ Malak El Halabi

Many things
such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly
are done worst when we try hardest to do them. ~ C.S. Lewis

Insomnia, from the Greek word meaning I can't fucking sleep! ~ Billy Crystal

His impatience for sleep often frightened that very sleep away. ~ Hugh Howey

A person who has not done one half his day's work by ten o'clock, runs a chance of leaving the other half undone. ~ Emily Bronte

Not at the same time - on insomnia. ~ J.D. Robb

Insomnia, then, is not just a state of sleeplessness, a matter of negatives. It involves the active pursuit of sleep. It is a state of longing. ~ Marina Benjamin

Yeah. And Savitar predates him. He has presided over this council since the very beginning, and notice, Savitar looks about thirty. We don't know what he is, but he ain't one of us and he ain't human. And trust me, you don't want to mess with him. (Paris)
Thank you for that highly unamusing summation. Next time I have insomnia, I know who to call. In the meantime, little lioness who would probably like to live another year, don't interrupt me again. I don't like it and I tend to kill the things I don't like. (Savitar) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

I prefer insomnia to anaesthesia. ~ Antonio Tabucchi

Am I sleeping? Have I slept at all? This is insomnia. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

He has so little energy in his body that he can only walk to the bathroom on the other side of the hallway twice a day.

After a few meters he is worn out, much worse than after the marathons he used to run. He was a triathlete, he earned a brown belt in judo, became Dutch champion in hockey, until he contracted pneumonia in 2005 and never recovered. Ever since, he has a headache, vertigo, and insomnia, but worst of all the fatigue: after minimal effort his muscles would lose all their strength and take days to recover. Only after a few years did he get a diagnosis: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). ~ Ellen De Visser

I used to think anxiety and insomnia drove me to success, but it was the stillness that let me be good at anything. When you extend the seconds of stillness, that's when you're able to think and learn. ~ Russell Simmons

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others - who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something people with courage can do without.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals with one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There's the glass you broke in anger, there's the hurt on X's face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves. ~ Joan Didion

You don't have INSOMNIA.
You're a writer with an unfinished book! ~ T.N. Suarez

People who sleep only two or three hours in the twenty-four are always geniuses. The ones you hear about, anyway. Never mind if the ones you don't hear about are dolts. Insomnia is genius. It must be. Think of all the work you could do the thoughts you could think, the books you could read, the love you could make, while the dull clods lie snoring. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I was 13 when I had my first bout of insomnia. My family was in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the summer, and day never really became night. ~ Siri Hustvedt

There was a voice, a song, a woman's voice that from time to time the breeze carries all the way up here to you from some open window; there was a lone song that on summer nights the air brought to you in bursts, and the moment you seemed to have grasped some note of it, it was already lost, and you were never sure you had really heard it and had not simply imagined it, desired to hear it, the dream of a woman's voice singing in the nightmare of your long insomnia. This is what you were waiting for, quiet and alert; it is no longer fear that makes you prick up your ears. You have begun to hear again this singing that reaches you with every note distinct, every timbre and colour, from the city that has been abandoned by all music. ~ Italo Calvino

Today I fell asleep reading a book. The book is called INSOMNIA. I win. ~ Adam Young

Alone with thoughts of what should have long been forgotten, I let myself be carried away into the silent screams of delirium. ~ Amanda Steele

Don't start me talking
I could talk all night
My mind goes sleepwalking
While I'm putting the world to right. ~ Elvis Costello

Whoever says sleep equals laziness is probably a bitter insomniac. ~ Joyce Rachelle

Every morning I sit at the kitchen table over a tall glass of water swallowing pills. (So my hands won't shake.) (So my heart won't race.) (So my face won't thaw.) (So my blood won't mold.) (So the voices won't scream.) (So I don't reach for knives.) (So I keep out of the oven.) (So I eat every morsel.) (So the wine goes bitter.) (So I remember the laundry.) (So I remember to call.) (So I remember the name of each pill.) (So I remember the name of each sickness.) (So I keep my hands inside my hands.) (So the city won't rattle.) (So I don't weep on the bus.) (So I don't wander the guardrail.) (So the flashbacks go quiet.) (So the insomnia sleeps.) (So I don't jump at car horns.) (So I don't jump at cat-calls.) (So I don't jump a bridge.) (So I don't twitch.) (So I don't riot.) (So I don't slit a strange man's throat.) ~ Jeanann Verlee

I can't sleep. I haven't slept in days. I hate this, hate insomnia more than anything, just lying there, brain going round, tick, tick, tick, tick. I itch all over. I want to shave my head. ~ Paula Hawkins

When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep, and you're never really awake. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love- you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you're over. You've caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night. The city, of course, can wreck it. So much insomnia. So many rhythms collide. The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know. ~ Renata Adler

Sleep resistance, bouts of insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, crawling into bed with parents in the middle of the night - all these are so common among children, it seems fair to call them 'normal.' ~ Siri Hustvedt

When I sat late, I mean late. A three-year old with insomnia is very similar to a heroin addict going through withdrawal. ~ Jim Gaffigan

I needed a vacation. I needed 5 women. I needed to get the wax out of my ears. My car needed an oil change. I'd failed to file my damned income tax. One of the stems had broken off of my reading glasses. There were ants in my apartment. I needed to get my teeth cleaned. My shoes were run down at the heels. I had insomnia. My auto insurance had expired. I cut myself every time i shaved. I hadn't laughed in 6 years. I tended to worry when there was nothing to worry about. And when there was something to worry about, i got drunk. ~ Charles Bukowski

Difficulties with concentration are correlated with sleep impairment, especially insomnia, arising from hypervigilance. The insomniac person is always on alert, which increases his or her stress-hormone levels and heart rate, and turns on the sympathetic nervous system. One of the roles of histamine, released in response to stress, is to ensure that you're wide-awake. These processes make relaxation and sleep difficult. ~ Doreen Virtue

The truth is there isn't anything to me at all. All I know is that I can't sleep well, I can't dream well and I'm quite in love with you. That's all there is to me. My greatest feature is my admiration for you. I know it's not healthy. Like my insomnia. Like my dreamless nights. You make living alright. My nightmares come when I think of a night without Valeria. That's when I realise you're dead. That's when I remember you've been gone for years. That's when I remember I'm awake. And I wait for this dream called Life to leave me to my peace once and for all and forever. ~ F.K. Preston

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life. ~ Virginia Woolf

insomnia has this romantic way of making the moon feel like perfect company. ~ Sabrina Benaim

In the first instance, therefore, global terrorism created a kind of global community sharing a common fate, something we had previously considered impossible. ~ Ulrich Beck

Just as ecstasy purifies you of the particular and the contingent, leaving nothing except light and darkness, so insomnia kills off the multiplicity and diversity of the world, leaving you prey to your private obsessions. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Rings and magazines; keychains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random ... and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel. ~ Stephen King

And if I do fall asleep, Marla has to keep track of Tyler. Where he goes. What he does. So maybe during the day, I can rush around and undo the damage. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

No amount of sleep will ever satisfy the tiredness i always feel. ~ Unknown