“Death had to take him in his sleep, for if he was awake there'd have been a fight.”

“England! awake! awake! awake!
Jerusalem thy sister calls!
Why wilt thou sleep the sleep of death
And close her from thy ancient walls?”

“He fought despairingly to go deeper into the blackness of a sleep, any sleep, even the sleep of death or some form of non-existence, but even with the loss of consciousness he dreamt he was awake, lying on the bed trying desperately to sleep. If he could find some way to prove that time had passed, no matter how short that time, he could tell himself that he had slept and perhaps then, just perhaps, he would feel rested.”

“He gave up and went back to loafing, found that he could sleep all right in the afternoons but that the practice kept him awake at night.”

“When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.”

“Every moment of every day and night he was able to take the measure of his failure now. Even his family's poverty which for years he had refused to admit, began to grow familiar to him, but like the memory of a companion that one has left behind. Rose-Anna…She'd been a young girl at his side, then tired, then overwhelmed, and here she was sleeping beside him on a kind of pallet, on the floor. He could hear the whimpers from the children in their sleep.”

“Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.”

“Diogenes the Cynic, when a little before his death he fell into a slumber, and his physician rousing him out of it asked him whether anything ailed him, wisely answered, "Nothing, sir; only one brother anticipates another,—Sleep before Death."”

“His mother had been the world to him, and although she had done her best to prepare him, he had been too young to fully understand what death meant—until she was gone, and the great, raw, gaping hole in his heart could not be filled or patched or mended. He looked for her everywhere, even after he had been shown her body—looked and looked and she could not be found.”

“I cannot be awake, for nothing looks to me as it did before, or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.”