“O sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature's soft nurse, how have I frightened thee. That thou no more will weigh my eyelids down, And steep my senses in forgetfulness?”
― William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part Two

“He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

“I'm just an insomniac struggling for a night where I don't dream of you anymore.”
― Lone Alaskan Gypsy

“My heart can feel the softness of a star
Only when the moon stays afar
I lay my mind on the pillow of sky
Where sleep dares not ever to pry”
― Munia Khan

“What else could I be? If I were a mono-thinker, I probably wouldn’t be an insomniac. How is a poly-thinker supposed to fall asleep, and more importantly, stay asleep, when thoughts just won’t stop darting! darting! darting! through my head?”
― Rachel Cohn, Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List

“In their previous lives, poets were bats, and thinkers were owls.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“I’m awake and I can’t sleep. The more I’m awake, the more I see, and the harder to sleep.”
― Donna Lynn Hope

“Poppy, a chronic insomniac in her first life, since found that sleep arrived easily, washing over her in a soporific tide that carried with it the flotsam of ambrosial dreams.”
― Kevin Ansbro, The Fish That Climbed a Tree

“A night full of nightmares is way better than a sleepless one.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Because of my experience in Desert Storm I have permanent Insomnia but don't get me wrong I love sleep I can never get enough of it.”
― Stanley Victor Paskavich

“Staring at the blue sky causes insomnia to occur in the human”
― Steven Magee, Light Forensics

“Whoever says sleep equals laziness is probably a bitter insomniac.”
― Joyce Rachelle

“Boy needs to get a good night's sleep. Otherwise, he'll be lucky to get accepted at SUNY-So Far Upstate You Might As Well Be In Canada, eh?”
― Rachel Cohn, Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List

“there’s no way I can sleep in any position with so much still unwritten about the glory of basements, where,
with all the promise in crock pot boxes, small animals go to die, piles of laundry hide the machines, rusted tools fall into other rusted tools giving way to unsung sculpture, soiled playing cards and unmatched socks strewn atop a punched-out screen door make a shaggy parquet; and a famished, leggy fluorescent tube barely winks on the entire scene.”
― Kristen Henderson, Drum Machine

“Sleep is so cute when it tries to compete with the internet.”
― Nitya Prakash

“On this account I feel always, on a Saturday night, as though I also were released from some yoke of labour, had some wages to receive, and some luxury of repose to enjoy. For the sake, therefore, of witnessing, upon as large a scale as possible, a spectacle with which my sympathy was so entire, I used after, on Saturday nights, after I had taken opium, to wander forth, without much regarding the direction or the sistance, to all the markets, and other parts of London, to which the poor resort on a Saturday night, for laying out their wages. Many a family party, consisting of a man, his wife, and sometimes one or two of his children, have I listened to, as they stood consulting on their ways and means, or the strength of their exchequer, or the price of household articles. Gradually I became familiar with their wishes, their difficulties, and their opinions. Sometimes there might be heard murmers of discontent: but far oftener expressions on the countenance, or uttered in words, of patience, hope, and tranquillity. And taken generally, I must say, that, in this point at least, the poor are far more philosophic than the rich - that they show a more ready and cheerful submission to what they consider as irremediable evils, or irreparable losses. Whenever I saw occasion, or could do it without appearing to be intrusive, I joined their parties; and gave my opinion upon the matter in discussion, which, if not always judicious, was always received indulgently. If wages were a little higher, or expected to be so, or the quartern loaf a little lower, or it was reported that onions and butter were expected to fall, I was glad: yet, if the contrary were true, I drew from opium some means of consoling myself. For opium (like the bee, that extracts its materials indiscriminately from roses and from the soot of chimneys) can overrule all feelings into a compliance with the master key. Some of these rambles lead me to great distances: for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time.”
― Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Analects From John Paul Richter

“Working hard to pay the bill,
I need a break and take a pill,
Need some sleep right away,
But insomnia gets in the way.”
― Ana Claudia Antunes, A-Z of Happiness: Tips for Living and Breaking Through the Chain that Separates You from Getting That Dream Job

“Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“Henry's also an insomniac. He suffers from Restless Leg Syndrome. I feel the sheets twitching as his legs move restlessly and think about how incredibly bourgeois we are, with our Sur La Table kitchenware, our Sundance catalogue lamps, our upper-middle class insomnia. Why can't we sleep, I wonder? We have enough to eat, we have a roof over our heads, we're not living in a mud hut sporting a thatch of gnarled leaves that barely cover our genitalia. I'm filled with self-loathing.”
― Shannon Bradley-Colleary, Into the Child "40 Weeks In The Gestational Wilderness"

“I'm pretty much the definition of sleep deprived, when the only thing about me you're looking at is my insomnia, except I don't act like it.”
― Queen Shore the SeaWing

“Trust me … as a lifetime award winning insomniac, I know that success doesn’t happen during or over nights. There’s a story behind the glory. We can write it or read it.”
― Karen E. Solomon, Pandemics and Other P-Words: How the Lockdown became my launchpad

“It was now three a.m., the time when night pushes into morning, your chance at sleep gone, when you feel as if you’re the only one awake in the world.”
― Scott Gordon, Head Fake