Quotes about insomnia

A collection of quotes on the topic of insomnia, sleep, night, sleeping.

Quotes about insomnia

“This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

“In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.”

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

Thinking, Suffering

“Take notice, Pheidias, that you are human yourself, and that the wretched man is also human, in order that you may not covet what's beyond you. But when you say that you suffer from insomnia, you'll know the cause if you'll examine yourself what man you are. You take a stroll in the market-place; you come in forthwith; if your two legs are tired you take a luxurious bath; you rise up and eat greedily at pleasure; your life itself is a sleep. In fine, you have no ill; your disease is luxury through which you have passed — but something rather hackneyed, my young master, occurs to me — please excuse me — as the saying goes, you know, you are so crowded by your blessings, know it well, that you have no room to defecate.”

Menander (-342–-291 BC) Athenian playwright of New Comedy

The Ghost, 31-43.

Life, Pleasure, Disease, Sleep

“With insomnia, you're never really awake; but you're never really asleep.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Variant: When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep, and you're never really awake.
Source: Fight Club

“Insomnia"

perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.”

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) American poet

“For six months I couldn't sleep. With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

Sleep

“That's the advantage of insomnia. People who go to be early always complain that the night is too short, but for those of us who stay up all night, it can feel as long as a lifetime. You get a lot done”

Banana Yoshimoto (1964) Japanese writer

Source: N.P

People, Feeling, Night

“He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Source: A Clean Well Lighted Place

Lie, Sleep

“My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I'd never have written a line.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Death on Credit

Source: Death on the Installment Plan

“Call me a sinner,
Mock me maliciously:
I was your insomnia,
I was your grief.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

“Insomnia is my greatest inspiration.”

Jon Stewart (1962) American political satirist, writer, television host, actor, media critic and stand-up comedian

“Am I sleeping? Have I slept at all? This is insomnia.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Sleep

“The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep.”

W.C. Fields (1880–1946) actor

Sleep

“I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?”

Lorrie Moore (1957) American writer

Fear, Time, Reading

“Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places.”

Charles Simic (1938) American poet

Source: Dime-Store Alchemy

Travel, Night

“I get the willies when I see closed doors. Even at work, where I am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely; if I am tired and dejected from a night of lies or booze or sex or just nerves and insomnia, I can almost smell the disaster mounting invisibly and flooding out toward me through the frosted glass panes. My hands may perspire, and my voice may come out strange. I wonder why. Something must have happened to me sometime.”

Joseph Heller book Something Happened

Opening Lines
Something Happened (1974)

Sex, Night

“Ulcers, high blood pressure and heart attacks, insomnia and depression, all stem from trying to do more than we can in a situation that has lost its humanity.”

Michael Elmore-Meegan (1959) British humanitarian

All shall be well (2014)

Heart

“Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across of thousands of high walls, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.”

Albert Camus (1913–1960) French author and journalist

American Journals (1978)

Cry, Night

“Give me bitter years of sickness,
Suffocation, insomnia, fever,
Take my child and my lover,
And my mysterious gift of song —
This I pray at your liturgy
After so many tormented days,
So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia
Might become a cloud of glorious rays.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

"Prayer," translated by Judith Hemschemeyer in Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova (1989)

Lovers

“It is a question of the systematic and interpretive organization of the sensational, scattered and narcissist surrealist experimental material, - that is to say, of everyday surrealist events:, br>nocturnal pollution, false recollection, dream, diurnal fantasy, the concrete transformation of nocturnal phosphene into a hypnagogic image or of "waking phosphene" into an objective image, - the nutritive caprice, - inter-uterine claims, - anamorphic hysteria, - the voluntary retention of the urine, - the involuntary retention of insomnia - the fortuitous image of exclusively exhibitionist tendency, -the incomplete action, - the frantic manner, - the regional sneeze, the anal wheelbarrow, the minimal mistake, the liliputian malaise, the super-normal physiological state, - the picture one leaves off painting, that which one paints, the territorial ringing of the telephone, "the deranging image", etc., etc.,
all these things, I say, and a thousand other instantaneous or successive sollicitations, revealing a minimum of irrational intentionalety or, on the contrary, a minimum of suspect phenomenal nullity, are associated, by the mechanisms of paranoiac-critical activity, in an indestructible delirious-interpretive system of political problems, paralytic images, more or less mammiferous questions, playing the role of the obsessing idea.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940, My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935, Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', pp. 15-16

Dreams, Idea, Question, Problem

“Paresis, as it is generally called in preference to the old GPI or general paralysis of the insane, is characterized by symptoms of bewildering variety, confirming the description of syphilis as the Great Imitator or, because of this very wealth of its ultimate manifestations, the Aristocrat of Diseases. Paresis involves a meningoencephalitis which marks its onset by personality changes, mild at first but growing steadily worse. There is irritability, failure of memory and judgement, insomnia, slovenliness, aggression, confusion, delusion, manic depression, epileptiform convulsion, slurred speech, incontinence, emaciation, sensational psychosis, finally death. The act of careless bohemian love, anonymous, quick and uncondomized, is proved not to have been worth the trouble or money…..”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

Love, Death, Money, Disease

“We struggle to manage complexity every day. We follow intricate diets to lose weight, juggle multiple remotes to operate our home entertainment systems, face proliferating data at the office, and hack through thickets of regulation at tax time. But complexity isn’t destiny. Sull and Eisenhardt argue there’s a better way: By developing a few simple yet effective rules, you can tackle even the most complex problems.
Simple rules are a hands-on tool to achieve some of our most pressing personal and professional objectives, from overcoming insomnia to becoming a better manager or a smarter investor. Simple rules can help solve some of our most urgent social challenges from setting interest rates at the Federal Reserve to protecting endangered marine wildlife along California’s coast.”

Kathleen M. Eisenhardt American economist

Book abstract
Simple Rules, 2015

Way, Home, Problem, Time

“Under the midnight sun, despair acquires the intensity of sex, insomnia the vehemence of art.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 12, “Father” (p. 337)

Art, Sex, Sun, Despair

“Things happen or they don't happen, that's all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony because we've lost the habit of falling asleep.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

Life

“Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Youth, Parent, Night

“The tendency of the families of wealth in every country to form a class by themselves, is deep-set in the human makeup. Rome carried the tendency one step further — she cemented the moneyed class in the various countries into an international combine. "Peace and order" were at last secure. An antitoxin against insomnia had been devised. Slave owners could now lay their heads on their pillows at night, without the fear of insurrection gnawing them through the night-watches. An uprising of the toiling masses, no matter how formidable, could be handled. Upon a rebellious district could be mobilized in shortest time six and twenty legions. The machinery of intimidation was complete. Man was undermost, and property paramount. The "Golden Age" — literally — set in. The Roman Empire, that apotheosis of property rights, fastened itself upon the world. Embracing all nations and tongues and climates, a motley crew, they had one cohering principle which swallowed up their diversities — the coherence of a common plunder.”

Bouck White (1874–1951) American author and novelist

Source: The Call of the Carpenter (1914), pp. 15-16

Money, Age, World, Fear

“Loneliness, insomnia, and change: the fear of these is even worse than the reality.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Fear, Reality, Change, Loneliness

“Oh, the way words lie down under decades, then the Union of Restless Diggers out of sheer insomnia pulls them up: daggers for the young but to us they look like flowers of nostalgia that grew in our mother’s foreign garden.”

Grace Paley (1922–2007) American writer and activist

"Listening"
Context: What is this crap, Mother, this life is short and terrible. What is this metaphysical shit, what is this disease you intelligentsia are always talking about.
First we said: Intelligentsia! Us? Oh, the way words lie down under decades, then the Union of Restless Diggers out of sheer insomnia pulls them up: daggers for the young but to us they look like flowers of nostalgia that grew in our mother’s foreign garden. What did my mother say? Darling, you should have come to Town Hall last night, the whole intelligentsia was there. My uncle, strictly: the intelligentsia will never permit it.!

Lie, Way, Flowers, Nostalgia

“I'm anal retentive. I'm a workaholic. I have insomnia. And I'm a control freak. That's why I'm not married. Who could stand me?”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

“They have read your novel... and they said only one thing, that, unfortunately, it is not finished. So I wanted to show you your hero. He has been sitting here for about two thousand years, sleeping, but, when the moon is full, he is tormented, as you see, by insomnia. And it torments not only him, but his faithful guardian, the dog. If it is true that cowardice is the most grave vice, then the dog, at least, is not guilty of it. The only thing that brave creature ever feared was thunderstorms. But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one who is loved.”

Mikhail Bulgakov book The Master and Margarita

Book Two in 'Time to Go! Time to Go!', B/O, here Woland is speaking to the Master about Pontius Pilate
The Master and Margarita (1967)

Sleep, Faith, Reading, Fate

“Wherever will the promised light be? Is there a paradise among the clouds maybe, rest in the wind, refreshment on the seabed? Where does the dark, the insomnia, the madness, the crying, the illness, the death finish? Where does God hide himself?”

Menotti Lerro (1980) Italian poet

Dove sarà mai la luce promessa? C’è forse un paradiso tra le nuvole, riposo nel vento, ristoro nei fondali marini? Dove finisce il buio, l’insonnia, la pazzia, il pianto, la malattia, la morte? Dove si nasconde Dio?
FROM: Andrew Mangham, The Poetry of Menotti Lerro, Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011, pp. 71-72. ISBN 978-1443828444

God, Light, Cry, Madness