"When I want to go to sleep, I must first get a whole menagerie of voices to shut up. You wouldn't believe what a racket they make in my room."
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Insomnia quotes
Insomnia
201 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside insomnia — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Insomnia quotes (page 2 of 11)
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"Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on."
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"There's a beauty to wisdom and experience that cannot be faked. It's impossible to be mature without having lived."
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"Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life."
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"No matter what time it is, wake me, even if it's in the middle of a Cabinet meeting."
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"You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel-a hunger and thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of thoughts leading nowhere, spinning round swift and steady."
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"Love without conversation is impossible."
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"Sleep, rest of things, O pleasing Deity, Peace of the soul, which cares dost crucify, Weary bodies refresh and mollify."
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"Remorse sleeps during a prosperous period but wakes up in adversity."
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"Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture."
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"Time, motion and wine cause sleep."
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"Even sleepers are workers and collaborators on what goes on in the universe."
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"Ruthless and arrogant though power can appear, it is only ever held by mere mammals who excrete and yearn, and who suffer from insomnia and insecurity. These mammals are also necessarily vain in the extreme, and often wish to be liked almost as much as they desire to be feared."
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"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."
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"When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door."
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"It appears that every man's insomnia is as different from his neighbours as are their daytime hopes and aspirations."
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"Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants."
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"Now blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep. It covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak."
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"If we rail and kick against it and grow bitter, we won't change the inevitable; but we will change ourselves. I know. I have tried it. I once refused to accept an inevitable situation with which I was confronted. I played the fool and railed against it, and rebelled. I turned my nights into hells of insomnia. I brought upon myself everything I didn't want. Finally, after a year of self-torture, I had to accept what I knew from the outset I couldn't possible alter."
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"What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?"
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