Tom Perrotta Quotes

I go to bed, and I wait for sleep as a man might wait for the executioner. I wait for its coming with dread, and my heart beats and my legs tremble, while my whole body shivers beneath the warmth of the bedclothes, until the moment when I suddenly fall asleep, as a man throws himself into a pool of stagnant water in order to drown. I do not feel this perfidious sleep coming over me as I used to, but a sleep which is close to me and watching me, which is going to seize me by the head, to close my eyes and annihilate me.

I feel the fear touches on something deeper. A sense perhaps of, "My life is speeding past me and I can't get a handle on it."

It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.

What keeps me up at night? Anxiety. Anxiety, the inability to go to sleep, it's quite literally that.

Sleepless nights I'm not a big fan of to be honest.

I was the person who stayed awake reading by the nightlight until the scary shadows made me crazy.

I'm so tired, but I can't sleep. Standing on the edge of something much too deep.

Well enough for old folks to rise early, because they have done so many mean things all their lives they can't sleep anyhow.

When it is dark, it seems to me as if I were dying, and I can't think any more.

I'm hopeless - all I know is that time is going past so fast.

While making "Possessed", I wept each morning on my drive to the studio, and I wept all the way back home. I found it impossible to sleep at night, so I'd lie in bed contemplating the future. I fear it with all my heart and soul even as I fear the dark.

Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.

Just as ecstasy purifies you of the particular and the contingent, leaving nothing except light and darkness, so insomnia kills off the multiplicity and diversity of the world, leaving you prey to your private obsessions.

The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.

Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house.

Not being able to sleep is terrible. You have the misery of having partied all night... Without the satisfaction.

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.

The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at ever conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbours soundly sleep.

Sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough.

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

Know what the best thing about insomnia is? That I get to stay up all night figuring it out.

Sleep makes the silence and the terrible fear go by more quickly, helps pass the time, since it's impossible to kill.

Why can I never go back to bed? Who's is the voice ringing in my head? Where is the sense in these desperate dreams? Why should I wake when I'm half past dead?

I'm afraid of the dark. I'm not kidding.

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