"Active imagination requires a state of reverie, half-way between sleep and waking."
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Sleep quotes
Sleep
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Sleep quotes (page 20 of 268)
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"You can't find the sound if you just love sleep."
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"I dug it, New York City, all-the streets and the snows and the starving and the five-flight walkups and sleeping in rooms with ten people. I dug the trains and the shadows, the way I dug ore mines and coal mines. I just jumped right to the bottom of New York."
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"The life of a non-Muslim to Muslim is worth as much as the life of a chicken is worth to you and me. We don't go around killing every chicken we see. In fact we keep them and feed them as long as they are useful to us. But we don't lose sleep when we have to slaughter them. So it is not that Muslims will necessarily go around massacring every non-Muslim. As long as these non-Muslims are useful to them, they are granted protection."
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"I never dreamed the sea so deep, The earth so dark; so long my sleep, I have become another child. I wake to see the world go wild."
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"So many nights I cried myself to sleep. Now that you love me, I love myself. I never thought I would say this. I never thought there'd be you."
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"You've only got to begin to do anything to find out how few honest, honourable people there are. Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I think: "Oh Lord, you've given us huge forests, infinite fields, and endless horizons, and we, living here, ought really to be giants."
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"I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep."
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"One should say before sleeping: I have lived many lives. I have been a slave and a prince. Many a beloved has sat upon my knee and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved. Everything that has been shall be again."
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"Infirm of purpose! Give me the daggers: the sleeping and the dead are but as pictures: ‘tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil"
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"How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert an atom--in graceful succession, in equal fullness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unraveled, nor shown."
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"He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence."
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"Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking... and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths...and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you."
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"It's been quite a while since I was really afraid that there was a boogeyman in my closet, although I am still very careful to keep my feet under the covers when I go to sleep, because the covers are magic, and if your feet are covered, it's like boogeyman Kryptonite."
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"If you're a bird, be an early bird. But if you're a worm, sleep late."
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"His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion."
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"Silence emerges from the sound of rain and spreads in a crescendo of gray monotony over the narrow street I contemplate. I’m sleeping while awake, standing by the window, leaning against it as against everything. I search in myself for the sensations I feel before these falling threads of darkly luminous water that stand out from the grimy building facades and especially from the open windows. And I don’t know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don’t know what to think or where I am."
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"Give me boredom. At least I know where I'm going to eat and sleep tonight."
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"A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness."
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"A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way."
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