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Six hours for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool.
-English Proverb
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Bed is the poor man's opera.
-Italian Proverb
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It's at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull. I don't know if anyone has ever pointed out that great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind. I wish I believed, as J. B. Priestley did, that consciousness continues after disembodiment or death, not forever, but for a long while. Three score years and ten is such a stingy ration of time, when there is so much time around. Perhaps that's why some of us are insomniacs; night is so precious that it would be pusillanimous to sleep all through it! A bad night is not always a bad thing.
-Brian W. Aldiss
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When to soft Sleep we give ourselves away,
And in a dream as in a fairy bark
Drift on and on through the enchanted dark
To purple daybreak--little thought we pay
To that sweet bitter world we know by day.
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Sonnet - Sleep
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The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Sleep is an eight-hour peep show of infantile erotica.
-J. G. Ballard
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Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity. There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against our souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations.
-Djuna Barnes
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We sleep, but the loom of life never stops, and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up in the morning.
-Henry Ward Beecher
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There is between sleep and us something like a pact, a treaty with no secret clauses, and according to this convention it is agreed that, far from being a dangerous, bewitching force, sleep will become domesticated and serve as an instrument of our power to act. We surrender to sleep, but in the way that the master entrusts himself to the slave who serves him.
-Maurice Blanchot
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The cool kindliness of sheets, that soon smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss of blankets.
-Rupert Brooke
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We term sleep a death by which we may be literally said to die daily; in fine, so like death, I dare not trust it without my prayers.
-Sir Thomas Browne
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Nor will the sweetest delight of gardens afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dullness of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a rose.
-Sir Thomas Browne
The Garden of Cyprus, chapter 5, 1658
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Sleep hath its own world, and a wide realm of wild reality. And dreams in their development have breath, and tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.
-Angela Carter
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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; 'tis meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. 'Tis the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap; and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise-man even. There is only one thing...that I dislike in sleep; 'tis that it resembles death; there's very little difference between a man in his first sleep, and a man in his last sleep.
-Miguel de Cervantes
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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.
-E. M. Cioran
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The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.
-Leonard Cohen
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Oh Sleep! it is a gentle thing, beloved from pole to pole, to Mary Queen the praise be given! She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven, that slid into my soul.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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I am accustomed to sleep, and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.
-Rene Descartes
Meditations on First Philosophy
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Sleeping alone, except under doctor's orders, does much harm. Children will tell you how lonely it is sleeping alone. If possible, you should always sleep with someone you love. You both recharge your mutual batteries free of charge.
-Marlene Dietrich, 1962
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I don't wake up for less than $10,000 a day.
-Linda Evangelista
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Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
-Benjamin Franklin
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Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
-William Golding
Pincher Martin, ch. 6, 1956
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We are not hypocrites in our sleep.
-William Hazlitt
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Sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have been born is of course the miracle.
-Heinrich Heine
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Books about Sleep
