Robin Hobb Quotes

I have major sleeping problems. I'd rather be up thinking about things than actually sleeping.

I am awake a lot of nights.

I have trouble going to sleep at night, because you always get the feeling that there is another thing you could do.

I have trouble sleeping, at the end of the night. There's a lot of stimulus and my brain is processing a lot of different arcs and personalities. I'm always processing things, so I don't sleep.

Sleep has no place it can call its own.

Nothing keeps me awake at night. I keep other people awake at night.

I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.

His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.

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

The thing that keeps me most awake is the desire and curiosity to learn more.

My life has been regulated by insomnia.

Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.

I don't know if you've ever had insomnia, but it's a really terrible feeling when it's days and weeks on end. It was kind of awful.

I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night.

When a man sleeps, he is steeped and lost in a limp toneless happiness: awake he is restless, tortured by his body and the illusion of existence. Why have men spent the centuries seeking to overcome the awakened body? Put it to sleep, that is a better way. Let it serve only to turn the sleeping soul over, to change the blood-stream and thus make possible a deeper and more refined sleep.

"Everyone is asleep. They've all been asleep for years. You seemed... awake." Alex is whispering now. He closes his eyes, opens them again. "I'm tired of sleeping."

For years now, I've wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.

One night I couldn't sleep. It was like 2:00 in the morning. I was thinking, 'What can I do?' I'm watching TV. I'm like, 'Let me do something else.' I'm not going to fall asleep for a few hours. What are my hobbies? There was the masturbation option. I skipped that because just knowing my kids are down the hall I felt psychotic. So, I went with watching more TV. I couldn't come up with anything. I was going, 'God, read a book.' Then I was like this, 'Where do I keep the books?' I've got nothing to do but watch TV.

It's funny how insomnia has a way of hauling faded memories up from the cellar of the mind, unearthing buried bits of nostalgia from deep within and spreading the broken, jagged pieces out in front of you like a display of junk at a garage sale. It makes you feel cheap and guilty when you didn't do a thing in the world to kindle the dull burn in your veins or the sting in your eyes. Some nights the painful past unexpectedly pushes up through the floorboards like an ugly nightmarish weed, and by doing so, cultivates and nurtures an entirely new species of headache.

Although she was giddy with exhaustion, sleep was a lover who refused to be touched.

So it comes to this; one doesn’t need rest. Why bother about sleep if one isn’t sleepy? That stands to reason, doesn’t it? Wait a minute, there’s a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable? …Ah, I see; it’s life without a break.

I've dreamed a lot, but i'm not a very good sleeper.

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.

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