Quotes about bed
page 6

Frances Farmer photo
Kid Cudi photo

“you don't really care about the trials of tomorrow, rather lay awake in a bed full of sorrow”

Kid Cudi (1984) American rapper, singer, songwriter, guitarist and actor from Ohio

-Pursuit of Happiness
Music

John Mayer photo
Peter Greenaway photo

“I like sleeping. (after a pause) You were conceived in this bed.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

8 1/2 Women

Philip Roth photo
Robert Bloomfield photo
Michelle Obama photo

“When I first arrived at school as a first-generation college student, I didn’t know anyone on campus except my brother. I didn’t know how to pick the right classes or find the right buildings. I didn’t even bring the right size sheets for my dorm room bed. I didn’t realize those beds were so long. So I was a little overwhelmed and a little isolated.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

Statements proceeding introduction of husband at College Opportunity Summit (16 January 2014) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/01/16/remarks-president-and-first-lady-college-opportunity-summit
2010s

“Your way leads you to lands of rain and wind—
mine takes me back to our old room, our bed.”

Đặng Trần Côn (1710–1745) writer

Source: Chinh phụ ngâm, Lines 53–54

Noel Gallagher photo
Saki photo
Tom McCarthy (writer) photo
André Maurois photo

“Old age is far more than white hair, wrinkles, the feeling that it is too late and the game finished, that the stage belongs to the rising generations. The true evil is not the weakening of the body, but the indifference of the soul. Upon crossing the shadow line, it is more the desire to act than the power to do so that is lost. Is it possible, after fifty years of experiences and disappointments, to retain the ardent curiosity of youth, the desire to know and understand, the power to love wholeheartedly, the certainty that beauty, intelligence, and kindness unite naturally, and to preserve faith in the efficacy of reason? Beyond the shadow line lies the realm of even, tempered light where the eyes, not being dazzled any more by the blinding sun of desire, can see things and people as they are. How is it possible to believe in the moral perfection of pretty women if you have loved one of them? How is it possible to believe in progress when you have discovered throughout a long and difficult life that no violent change can triumph over human nature and that it is only the most ancient customs and ceremonies that can provide people with the flimsy shelter of civilization? "What's the use?" says the old man to himself. This is perhaps the most dangerous phrase he can utter, for after having said: "What's the use of struggling?" he will say one day: "What's the use of going out?" then: "What's the use of leaving my room?" then: "What's the use of leaving my bed?" and at last comes "What's the use of living?"”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

which opens the portals of death.
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Growing Old

Mrs Patrick Campbell photo

“The deep, deep peace of the double-bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue.”

Mrs Patrick Campbell (1895–1940) British stage actress

Quoted in Alexander Woollcott, “The First Mrs. Tanqueray,” While Rome Burns (1934)

Tommy Douglas photo
Scott Lynch photo
George Moore (novelist) photo
Tim O'Brien photo

“Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it.”

Tim O'Brien (1946) American novelist

Source: In the Lake of The Woods (1994), p. 87

Gideon Mantell photo
Richard Harris Barham photo
Thomas Campbell photo
Jason Mraz photo
Georges Bataille photo

“Man's secret horror of his foot is one of the explanations for the tendency to conceal its length and form as much as possible. Heels of greater or lesser height, depending on the sex, distract from the foot's low and flat character. Besides the uneasiness is often confused with a sexual uneasiness; this is especially striking among the Chinese who, after having atrophied the feet of women, situate them at the most excessive point of deviance. The husband himself must not see the nude feet of his wife, and it is incorrect and immoral in general to look at the feet of women. Catholic confessors, adapting themselves to this aberration, ask their Chinese penitents "if they have not looked at women's feet.
The same aberration is found among the Turks (Volga Turks, Turks of Central Asia), who consider it immortal to show their nude feet and whoe ven go to bed in stockings.
Nothing similar can be cited from classical antiquity (apart from the use of very high soles in tragedies). The most prudish Roman matrons constantly allowed their nude toes to be seen. On the other hand, modesty concerning feet developed excessively in the modern ea and only started to disappear in the nineteenth century. M. Salomon Reinarch has studied this development in detail in the article entitled Pieds pudiques [Modest Feet], insisting on the role of Spain, where women's feet have been the object of most dreaded anxiety and thus were the cause of crimes. The simple fact of allowing the shod foot to be seen, jutting up from under a skirt, was regarded as indecent. Under no circumstances was it possible to touch the foot of a woman.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, p.21-22

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Wallace Stevens photo
John Fante photo
D. S. Bradford photo

“By now the ghosts have gone to bed
Exhaling the last breath of a revolution
Cycling on to the next existence
In the Elemental Evolution”

D. S. Bradford (1982) musician

Elemental Evolution, https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/D-S-Bradford/Elemental-Evolution, chorus
Elemental Evolution (2016)

Richard Brautigan photo

“Everybody wants to go to bed
with everybody else, they're
lined up for blocks, so I'll
go to bed with you. They won't
miss us.”

Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) American novelist, poet, and short story writer

"-2"
Rommel Drives on deep into Egypt

Samuel Butler photo
Robert Burns photo
Albert Barnes photo
Bernard Cornwell photo
Joe Higgins photo

“In view of the fact that the Royal Family of Britain is one of the wealthiest families in the world and this country is almost sleeping rough, so to speak, figuratively, would you ask the Queen if she might make a contribution towards her own bed and breakfast costs to assist the unfortunate taxpayers, and go easier on them?”

Joe Higgins (1949) Irish socialist politician

JOE http://joe.ie/news-politics/current-affairs/td-joe-higgins-says-queen-should-pay-bed-and-breakfast-for-visit-0011580-1, CNN http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/05/16/ireland.uk.queen.higgins/

James Russell Lowell photo

“These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred,
Each softly lucent as a rounded moon;
The diver Omar plucked them from their bed,
FitzGerald strung them on an English thread.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

In a Copy of Omar Khayyam.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred,
Each softly lucent as a rounded moon;
The diver Omar plucked them from their bed,
FitzGerald strung them on an English thread.

Cassandra Clare photo
Thomas Brooks photo
John Muir photo

“One shining morning, at the head of the Pacheco Pass, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most divinely beautiful and sublime I have ever beheld. There at my feet lay the great central plain of California, level as a lake thirty or forty miles wide, four hundred long, one rich furred bed of golden Compositae. And along the eastern shore of this lake of gold rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, in massive, tranquil grandeur, so gloriously colored and so radiant that it seemed not clothed with light, but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city. Along the top, and extending a good way down, was a rich pearl-gray belt of snow; then a belt of blue and dark purple, marking the extension of the forests; and stretching along the base of the range a broad belt of rose-purple, where lay the miners' gold and the open foothill gardens — all the colors smoothly blending, making a wall of light clear as crystal and ineffably fine, yet firm as adamant. Then it seemed to me the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years in the midst of it, rejoicing and wondering, seeing the glorious floods of light that fill it, — the sunbursts of morning among the mountain-peaks, the broad noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the thousand dashing waterfalls with their marvelous abundance of irised spray, — it still seems to me a range of light.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

" The Treasures of the Yosemite http://books.google.com/books?id=ZzWgAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA483", The Century Magazine, volume XL, number 4 (August 1890) pages 483-500 (at page 483)
1890s

Sri Aurobindo photo

“It is not by these means [modern humanism and humanitarianism, idealism, etc. ] that humanity can get that radical change of its ways of life which is yet becoming imperative, but only by reaching the bed-rock of Reality behind,… not through mere ideas and mental formations, but by a change of the consciousness, an inner and spiritual conversion. But that is a truth for which it would be difficult to get a hearing in the present noise of all kinds of many-voiced clamour and confusion and catastrophe…. Science has missed something essential; it has seen and scrutinised what has happened and in a way how it has happened, but it has shut its eyes to something that made this impossible possible, something it is there to express. There is no fundamental significance in things if you miss the Divine Reality; for you remain embedded in a huge surface crust of manageable and utilisable appearance. It is the magic of the Magician you are trying to analyse, but only when you enter into the consciousness of the Magician himself can you begin to experience the true origination, significance and circles of the Lila…. Another danger may then arise [once materialism begins to give way]… not of a final denial of the Truth, but the repetition in old or new forms of a past mistake, on one side some revival of blind fanatical obscurantist sectarian religionism, on the other a stumbling into the pits and quagmires of the vitalistic occult and the pseudo-spiritual'mistakes that made the whole real strength of the materialistic attack on the past and its credos. But these are phantasms that meet us always on the border line or in the intervening country between the material darkness and the perfect Splendour. In spite of all, the victory of the supreme Light even in the darkened earth-consciousness stands as the one ultimate certitude….”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Undated
India's Rebirth

Michel Danino photo
Constantine P. Cavafy photo

“That guy is so quick, he can switch off the light and get into bed before the room is dark.”

Jack Gibson (1929–2008) Australian rugby league player and coach

Gibson making an assessment on fast winger Andrew Ettingshausen during his summary of a match on television.

Leonard Cohen photo
Dylan Moran photo

“Days are stupid length. They are just long enough to get regret and then you have to go to bed.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

on days.
Yeah, Yeah (2011)

Lin Yutang photo

“A man may own a thousand acres of land, and yet he still sleeps upon a bed of five feet.”

Source: The Importance of Living (1937), p. 38 (Chinese saying)

Cormac McCarthy photo
Thomas Jackson photo

“Captain, my religious belief teaches me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has fixed the time for my death. I do not concern myself about that, but to be always ready, no matter when it may overtake me. Captain, that is the way all men should live, and then all would be equally brave.”

Thomas Jackson (1824–1863) Confederate general

Speaking to Captain John D. Imboden (24 July 1861), as quoted in Stonewall Jackson As Military Commander (2000) by John Selby, p. 25; sometimes quoted as "My religious beliefs teach me..."

Berthe Morisot photo

“I will achieve it only [being an artist] by perseverance, and by openly asserting my determination to emancipate myself, [but].... I both lament and envy your [Edma's] fate. Bichette [her niece] helps me to understand maternal love; she comes onto my bed every morning and plays so sweetly.... life gets more complicated by the day here now I am gripped by the desire to have children, that' all I need.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

in an unpublished extract from a letter of Berthe to Edma, written in 1869; as cited in The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot, ed. Denis Rouart; Camden, London 1986 / Kinston, R. I. Moyer Bell, 1989, p. 31 (private collection)
1860 - 1870

Daniel De Leon photo
Ryan Adams photo
John Harvey Kellogg photo
Aleksis Kivi photo

“Grove of Tuoni, grove of night!
There thy bed of sand is light.
Thither my baby I lead.
Mirth and joy each long hour yields
In the Prince of Tuoni's fields
Tending the Tuonela cattle.
Mirth and joy my babe will know,
Lulled to sleep at evening glow
By the pale Tuonela maiden.
Surely joy hours will hold,
Lying in thy cot of gold,
Hearing the nightjar singing.
Grove of Tuoni, grove of peace!
There all strife and passion cease.
Distant the treacherous world.”

Aleksis Kivi (1834–1872) Finnish writer

"Tuonen lehto, öinen lehto! / Siell' on hieno hietakehto, / Sinnepä lapseni saatan. // Siell' on lapsen lysti olla, / Tuonen herran vainiolla / Kaitsea Tuonelan karjaa. // Siell' on lapsen lysti olla, / Illan tullen tuuditella / Helmassa Tuonelan immen. // Onpa kullan lysti olla, / Kultakehdoss' kellahdella, / Kuullella kehräjälintuu. // Tuonen viita, rauhan viita! / Kaukana on vaino, riita, / Kaukana kavala maailma." (Äiti Aleksis Kiven kuvaamana, koonnut Ukko Kivistö, Turussa, kustannusosakeyhtiö Aura 1948)

Thomas Gray photo

“See the wretch that long has tost
On the thorny bed of pain,
At length repair his vigour lost,
And breathe and walk again:
The meanest floweret of the vale,
The simplest note that swells the gale,
The common sun, the air, the skies,
To him are opening paradise.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

Source: Ode on the Pleasure Arising from Vicissitude http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=oopv (1754), Line 41

“You can, after all, produce an orgasm yourself if that's what you want, so we must go to bed for something more.”

Merle Shain (1935–1989) Canadian writer

Some Men are More Perfect Than Others (1973)

Honoré de Balzac photo

“Love is like some fresh spring, that leaves its cresses, its gravel bed and flowers to become first a stream and then a river, changing its aspect and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where restricted natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in endless contemplation.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

L'amour est une source naïve, partie de son lit de cresson, de fleurs, de gravier, qui rivière, qui fleuve, change de nature et d'aspect à chaque flot, et se jette dans un incommensurable océan où les esprits incomplets voient la monotonie, où les grandes âmes s'abîment en de perpétuelles contemplations.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831), Part II: A Woman Without a Heart

Margaret Sanger photo

“The marriage-bed is the most degenerating influence of the social order.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

Alice Groff, "The Marriage Bed", The Woman Rebel, V.I No. 5, p. 39 (edited by Margaret Sanger)
Misattributed

Yukio Mishima photo
Miss Shangay Lily photo
George Farquhar photo
Anthony Burgess photo
Jason Mraz photo
Herman Melville photo

“What troops
Of generous boys in happiness thus bred —
Saturnians through life's Tempe led,
Went from the North and came from the South,
With golden mottoes in the mouth,
To lie down midway on a bloody bed.”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

On the Slain Collegians, st. 2
Battle Pieces: And Aspects of the War (1860)

Shane Claiborne photo
John Milton photo
Bliss Carman photo

“Here’s to the day
That wondrous May,
A-roaming through the heather,
When her little shoes
And my big boots
Were out on the hills together.

And here’s to the night
Of our delight,
That held the stars in tether,
When her little shoes
And my big boots
Were under the bed together.”

Bliss Carman (1861–1929) author

The full toast, as reported in New York Sun. Quoted in John Coldwell Adams, Confederation Voices http://www.uwo.ca/english/canadianpoetry/confederation/John%20Coldwell%20Adams/Confederation%20Voices/chapter%203.html, 2007.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo
Dhyan Chand photo

“All men believed they had their own magics in bed.”

Source: Grass (1989), Chapter 7 (p. 120)

Thomas Browne photo
Paul Celan photo

“You opened your eyes -I saw my darkness live. I see through it down to the bed; there too it is mine and lives.”

Paul Celan (1920–1970) Romanian poet and translator

"From Darkness to Darkness," in: Donald Wesling, ‎Tadeusz Sławek (1995). Literary Voice: The Calling of Jonah. p. 54

Tori Amos photo

“So she prays for a prankster and lust in the marriage bed
And he waits till she can give
And he waits and he waits.”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

Lust, a song on a couple's healing after trauma.
Songs

Frida Kahlo photo
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley photo
Kent Hovind photo
John Donne photo

“Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
Cosmographers, and their map, who lie
Flat on this bed.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness, stanza 2

Tom Robbins photo
Margaret Thatcher photo
Francis Quarles photo

“The way to bliss lies not on beds of down,
And he that has no cross deserves no crown.”

Francis Quarles (1592–1644) English poet

Esther (1621), Sec. 9, Meditation 9.

Andrew Ure photo

“The stanniferous small veins, or thin flat masses, though of small extent, are sometimes very numerous, interposed between certain rocks, parallel to their beds, and are commonly called tin-floors.”

Andrew Ure (1778–1857) Scottish doctor and chemist

1878, p. 1000.
A Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and Mines, 1844

Eugène Delacroix photo
Evelyn Waugh photo
Ryan Adams photo

“Put your troubles behind you and go on to bed”

Ryan Adams (1974) American alt-country/rock singer-songwriter

Goodnight Rose
29 (2005)

“Goe to bed with the Lambe, and rise with the Larke.”

John Lyly (1554–1606) English politician

Source: Euphues and his England, P. 229. Compare: "To rise with the lark and go to bed with the lamb", Breton, Court and Country, 1618 (reprint, page 182); "Rise with the lark, and with the lark to bed", James Hurdis, The Village Curate.

Jonathan Stroud photo
Tracey Ullman photo
Carl Rowan photo
Javier Marías photo

“…and what gets me out of bed in the mornings continues to be the expectation of what might happen, all unannounced. I'm always expecting the unexpected, and I still fantasise about what might still be.”

Javier Marías (1951) Spanish writer

...y lo que me hace levantarme por las mañanas sigue siendo la espera de lo que está por llegar y no se anuncia, es la espera de lo inesperado, y no ceso de fantasear con lo que ha de venir.
Source: Todas las Almas [All Souls] (1989), p. 137

John Tyler photo
Gerald Durrell photo

“Halfway up the slope, guarded by a group of tall, slim, cypress-trees, nestled a small strawberry-pink villa, like some exotic fruit lying in the greenery. The cypress-trees undulated gently in the breeze, as if they were busily painting the sky a still brighter blue for our arrival.
The villa was small and square, standing in its tiny garden with an air of pink-faced determination. Its shutters had been faded by the sun to a delicate creamy-green, cracked and bubbled in places. The garden, surrounded by tall fuschia hedges, had the flower beds worked in complicated geometrical patterns, marked with smooth white stones. The white cobbled paths, scarcely as wide as a rake's head, wound laboriously round beds hardly larger than a big straw hat, beds in the shape of stars, half-moons, triangles, and circles all overgrown with a shaggy tangle of flowers run wild. Roses dropped petals that seemed as big and smooth as saucers, flame-red, moon-white, glossy, and unwrinkled; marigolds like broods of shaggy suns stood watching their parent's progress through the sky. In the low growth the pansies pushed their velvety, innocent faces through the leaves, and the violets drooped sorrowfully under their heart-shaped leaves. The bougainvillaea that sprawled luxuriously over the tiny iron balcony was hung, as though for a carnival, with its lantern-shaped magenta flowers. In the darkness of the fuschia-hedge a thousand ballerina-like blooms quivered expectantly. The warm air was thick with the scent of a hundred dying flowers, and full of the gentle, soothing whisper and murmur of insects.”

My Family and Other Animals (1956)

Thomas Kyd photo
Harry Turtledove photo
Tenzin Gyatso photo

“If you think you are too small to make a difference, you have never been in bed with a mosquito”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

The earliest known example of this quote comes from a January 1993 article in Time magazine, where it is associated with British businesswoman Anita Roddick:: "Even Body Shop trucks are employed as rolling billboards for pithy slogans. Roddick's current favorite, taken from the side of one of her company's lorries: IF YOU THINK YOU'RE TOO SMALL TO HAVE AN IMPACT, TRY GOING TO BED WITH A MOSQUITO".
IN the 21st century, it was cited as an "African proverb". Earliest attribution to Dalai Lama is from 2004.
Disputed
Source: Philip Elmer-DeWitt, "Anita the Agitator" https://books.google.com/books?id=Cm7uAAAAMAAJ&dq=%22anita+roddick%22+mosquito&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=mosquito, Time, 1993-01-25
Source: https://indianinthemachine.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/if-you-think-youre-too-small-to-make-a-difference-try-sleeping-in-a-closed-room-with-a-mosquito-african-proverb/
Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=K8Q53xW1ie8C&pg=PA1&dq=%22too+small+to+make+a+difference%22+mosquito+lama&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjjxrTbkbnJAhVHLYgKHVfdB84Q6AEIIjAB#v=onepage&q=%22too%20small%20to%20make%20a%20difference%22%20mosquito%20lama&f=false

Herbert Giles photo
Neil Diamond photo