“What hath night to do with sleep?”
“The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.”
“I ve always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.”
“For years now, I ve wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.”
“Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work and helps make something of the world.”
“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, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then...and then -- ah -- we open our eyes and the day is before us and ... we become ourselves.”
“It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.”
“Death was a friend, and sleep was Death s brother.”
“Insomnia is a variant of Tourette s--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.”
“If you can t sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there and worrying. It s the worry that gets you, not the loss of sleep.”
“Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.”
“I don t know why it should be, I am sure; but the sight of another man asleep in bed when I am up, maddens me.”
“You re always in a rush, or else you re too exhausted to have a proper conversation. Soon enough, the long hours, the traveling, the broken sleep have all crept into your being and become part of you, so everyone can see it, in your posture, your gaze, the way you move and talk.”
“Sleep is not on good terms with broken hearts. It will have nothing to do with them.”
“Am I sleeping? Have I slept at all? This is insomnia.”
“Gabe? The newchild stirred slightly in his sleep. Jonas looked over at him. There could be love , Jonas whispered.”
“Asleep, he looked a lot younger than going-on-seventeen, but I had noticed that Johnny looked younger when he was asleep too, so I figured everyone did. Maybe people are younger when they are asleep.”