Sleep Quotes

“I'll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again.”
― Eugène Ionesco, Man With Bags

“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 at its pleasure. 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 if we dream at such a time, 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 impossibilty to separate the two. Nor is this, the most striking phenomenon, incidental to such a state. It is an undoubted fact, that although our senses of touch and sight be for the time dead, yet our sleeping thoughts, and the visionary scenes that pass before us, will be influenced, and materially influenced, by the mere silent presence of some external object: which may not have been near us when we closed our eyes: and of whose vicinity we have had no waking consciousness. ”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“Just let me sleep," she grumbled. "Let me sleep, and I'll sign a paper that you're a fucking angel.”
― Kim Harrison, Pale Demon

“I sleep all day. Noises flit around the house- garbage truck in the alley, rain, tree rapping against the bedroom window. I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing, refusing. Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion. [...] It is afternoon, it is night, it is morning. Everything is reduced to this bed, this endless slumber that makes the days into one day, makes time stop, stretches and compacts time until it is meaningless.”
― Audrey Niffenegger

“All I want is to sleep--to dream. Life is better in dreams.”
― Christina Westover, Poisoning Sylvie

“How can non-existence get sick of itself?

Everytime you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning waking with something else, something quite impossible even to think about. We don't even have the instrument to do it, because our mind & our world are the same thing.”
― Victor Pelevin, Babylon

“Plans make dreams reality.”
― Susan Pace-Koch, Get Out Of My Head, I Should Go To Bed

“She once again thought about how badly she wanted to crawl back beneath the mound of already cooling blankets that covered her bed like an inviting nest.”
― Kimberly Derting, The Body Finder

“... all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live.”
― Dan Simmons, A Winter Haunting

“Lie you easy, dream you light,
And sleep you fast for aye;
And luckier may you find the night
Than ever you found the day.”
― A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

“I used to sleep the sleep of someone who knew she was loved. Now, I didn't.”
― Kristen Ashley, For You

“Do we choose sleep? Hell no and bullshit - we fall. We give ourselves over to possibility, to whim and fancy, to the bed, to the pillow, the tiny white tablet. And these choose for us.”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“I had a dream about you last night. Eons ago, we created a Universe, then sat back and watched miniature versions of ourselves try to make all the same mistakes we did.”
― Michael Summers, I Had a Dream About You

“Sleep: the stepchild of Death.”
― Nancy A. Collins, In the Blood

“Mmmm… stay.” Her voice was barely audible, as she grazed her lips against mine and her head fell back against the pillow into a deep sleep.”
― J.D. Stroube, Caged in Darkness

“Ich werde stehen und warten.
Ich werde müde werden.
Ich werde nicht einschlafen.
Ich werde sterben.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“The quality it had now, in fresh untempered sunlight, was neither faerie nor austere; the changing shadows of dusk and midnight had vanished with the darkness and the rain, and walls and roof and towers were bathed in the radiance that comes only in the first hours of the day, soft, new-washed, the delicate aftermath of dawn. The people who slept within must surely bear some imprint of this radiance in themselves, must turn instinctively to the light seeping through the shutters, while the ghostly dreams and sorrows of the night slipped away, finding sanctuary in the unwakened forest trees the sun had not yet touched.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat

“I had a dream about you last night... You replaced all the people in your life with kittens. It felt more like a prediction of the future.”
― Amy Summers, I Had a Dream About You

“She had been in one of those sleeps so heavy they leave you feeling sad, disorientated, your stomach full of tears. A sleep so deep, so dark, that you see yourself dying, that you wake up soaked with cold sweat, paradoxically exhausted.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“And so I fell devoutly asleep and slept a long time, because young people seem to need sleep more than the old, who have already slept so much and are preparing to sleep for all eternity.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“You observe, question?' he asks again.
'No.'
'Observe.'
'You want me to observe you sleep?'
'Yes. Want want want.'
Through unspoken agreement, a tripled word means extreme emphasis.
'Why?'
'I sleep better if you observe.”
― Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

“I had a dream about you last night... shortly after I woke up screaming in terror.”
― Amy Summers, I Had a Dream About You

“I had a dream about you last night… it was raining and you were fishing for fire to set a sandcastle a flame.”
― Nicole McKay, I Had a Dream About You

“I had a dream about you last night... you sat in a cardboard box and said you were a tree.”
― Nicole McKay, I Had a Dream About You

“I had a dream about you last night... you were crying over spilt ink screaming "the words, the what could have been beautiful words.”
― Nicole McKay, I Had a Dream About You

“And yet, I was scared of falling asleep, because the moment I fell asleep my wounds would heal and right then I didn’t want that to happen. Right then, I found a strange but real comfort in the pain.”
― Matt Haig, The Humans

“I had a dream about you last night.. You pretended not to be a three hole punch.”
― Amy Summers, I Had a Dream About You

“Sleeping gave me time off from myself — a delicious sort of respite. Without it I grow overfamiliar, sticky with self-contempt.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“I had a dream about you last night... you made a beard for yourself out of forty two bags of Twizzlers.”
― Nicole McKay, I Had a Dream About You

“They had slept in the shelter of the ruins, though neither of them really got true rest.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Empire of Storms