Insomniacs Quotes

She'd pushed it down, crushed it beneath the weight of stubborn determination, but still it haunted her at night, when such terrors shamble from their dens to torment innocent insomniacs. ~ Ari Marmell

In my desperation to try to lull myself into a gentle sloom, I have created a list of things that will often assist my descent into delicious treacle-sleep. The list includes a series of things I can do if I go to bed and wake up early, and includes things like playing games and reading books, but one item that continually seems to work is telling myself:

The faster I go to sleep, the faster I can have cookies for breakfast.

This idea might seem rudimentary, but it staves off the sulks long enough that I can find a few hours of sleep, even on the hottest of days. If only Biscuit Power worked for other insomniacs, cookies might save humanity from itself. ~ Michelle Franklin

Sometimes I think I'm schizophrenic. Dissociative. Possibly a split personality. It wouldn't be unheard of. All sorts of disorders show up in ancient family trees - hemophiliacs, insomniacs, lunatics…gingers. Guess I should feel lucky not to be any of those. ~ Emma Chase

Paris is an insomniac's heaven. There is always something to photograph, something hidden in the shadows. One can see so much more in the darkness than in the light of day. ~ Francine Prose

Olivia Newton-John - Australia's gift to insomniacs. It's nothing but the blonde singing the bland. ~ Minnie Riperton

One blanket, coupled with a fluffy pillow, could be implemented as a torture device for insomniacs. ~ Jarod Kintz

His low voice breaks the stillness. "You didn't say what you were doing out this late."
"I couldn't sleep either," I reply. Not a lie.
His mouth curves. "So we're perfect for each other. A pair of insomniacs."
Perfect for each other.
I grin a mad, stupid smile. ~ Sophie Jordan

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

Insomniac is an impassioned work-an inspired amalgam of academic and first-hand research, memoir, analysis, and the kind of obsessive brooding we associate with the insomniac state. Much here is fascinating, and much is upsetting; here is a cri de coeur from a lifetime insomniac that is sure to appeal to the vast army of fellow insomniacs the world over. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Neither does philosophy deny the utility of certain kinds of anxiety. After all, as successful insomniacs have long suggested, it may be the anxious who survive best in the world. ~ Alain De Botton

Margaret was not dreaming nor was she quite asleep, although the moon looking at her face believed she was. She was experiencing the thing insomniacs dread-- not being awake but the ticky-tacky thoughts that fill in the space where sleep ought to be. Rags and swatches; draincloths and crumpled paper napkins. Old griefs and embarrassments; jealousies and offense. Just common ignoble scraps not deep enough for dreaming and not light enough to dismiss. ~ Toni Morrison

I have met guys who work the overnight shift at 7-11, selling Slurpees and Camels to insomniacs who have more introspection than a lot of people in the mainstream media. ~ Bernard Goldberg

THE PUZZLE IS WHY SO MANY PEOPLE LIVE so badly. Not so wickedly, but so inanely. Not so cruelly, but so stupidly. There is little to admire and less to imitate in the people who are prominent in our culture. We have celebrities but not saints. Famous entertainers amuse a nation of bored insomniacs. Infamous criminals act out the aggressions of timid conformists. Petulant and spoiled athletes play games vicariously for lazy and apathetic spectators. People, aimless and bored, amuse themselves with trivia and trash. Neither the adventure of goodness nor the pursuit of righteousness gets headlines. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

Bedtime is daytime,
and we come into bloom
after midnight. ~ Lenore Kandel

We have often had this particular exchange about climate and landscape and why we both feel so lonely here uprooted. It was what each of us had wanted of course.Besides wanting to experience a place we hated, we wanted to be insomniacs and loners, losers and drop-outs. To know the sky was the only location of meaning and joy left to us. ~ Fanny Howe

As he reached for his Visa card, the security monitor next to the register caught Billy in all his glory: football burly but slump-shouldered, his pale face with its exhaustion-starred eyes topped with half a pitchfork's worth of prematurely graying hair. He was only forty-two, but that crushed-cellophane gaze of his combined with a world-class insomniac's posture had once gotten him into a movie at a senior citizen's discount. ~ Richard Price

Turn to my left and see a young couple walking along the sidewalk. Seattle's Alki Beach is pretty much deserted, aside from a few die-hards, or early morning insomniacs, like me. The young couple are walking away from me, hand in hand, smiling at each other, and I point my lens at them and click. I zoom in on their sneaker-clad feet and locked hands and shoot some more, my photographer's eye appreciating their intimate moment on the beach. I inhale the salty air and stare out at the sound once again as a red-sailed boat gently glides out on the water. The early morning sunshine is ~ Kristen Proby

Brian Doyle about the Irish custom of "taking to the bed."

He says "In Irish culture, taking to the bed with a gray heart is not considered especially odd. People did and do it for understandable reasons - ill health, or the black dog, or, most horrifyingly, to die during An Gorta Mor, the great hunger, when whole families took to their beds to slowly starve…And in our time: I know a woman who took to her bed for a week after September eleventh, and people who have taken to their beds for days on end to recover from shattered love affairs, the death of a child, a physical injury that heals far faster than the psychic wound gaping under it. I've done it myself twice, once as a youth and once as a man, to think through a troubled time in my marriage. Something about the rectangularity of the bed, perhaps, or supinity, or silence, or timelessness; for when you are in bed but not asleep there is no time, as lovers and insomniacs know.

Yet, anxious, heartsick, we take to the bed, saddled by despair and dissonance and disease, riddled by muddledness and madness, rattled by malaise and misadventure, and in the ancient culture of my forbears this was not so unusual….For from the bed we came and to it we shall return, and our nightly voyages there are nutritious and restorative, and we have taken to our beds for a thousand other reasons, loved and argued and eater and seethed there, and sang and sobbed and suckled, and burned with fevers and visions and lust, a ~ Brian Doyle