Patrick deWitt Quotes

It was always late at night, when everything and everyone else was quiet, that those voices would rise like ghosts, soft and haunting, filling your mind until sleep finally came.

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

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

I cannot sleep in your presence In your absence, tears prevent me you watch me my beloved on each sleepiness night and Only you see the difference

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

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.

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 tell myself it's a virtue, my failure to sleep in my own house, or at all. I tell myself that I spend more hours than most people aware that I am alive, and that over a lifetime this adds up to more living, more aliveness. I am more alive than the rest of my family. Which is my greatest night fear. Which is why I hunt. I don't ever want to be more alive than they are.

Because, really, what was worse than lying wide-awake in the dark, watching your life drip away, one irreplaceable minute after another?

Night is torment. That is why people go to sleep. To avoid clear sight and torment.

O sleep! O gentle sleep! Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee, That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down And steep my senses in forgetfulness? Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs, Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee, And hush'd with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber, Than in the perfum'd chambers of the great, Under the canopies of costly state, And lull'd with sound of sweetest melody?

What hath night to do with sleep?

Three o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I am so happy.

I'm an insomniac, my mind works the night shift.

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

Fear is an interesting energy that we all have to face. Some people step up and aren't afraid but still come up short. And some would rather cop out: "My shoulder hurts" or "I didn't give it my all." They can sleep at night.

It's great, but there is one problem. She doesn't sleep. At night she seems to turn into a vampire. She wakes up every night five or 10 times, asking for things, singing, calling out.

WAKING AT NIGHT The blue river is grey at morning and evening. There is twilight at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark wondering if this quiet in me now is a beginning or an end.

Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.

There are some nights when sleep plays coy, aloof and disdainful. And all the wiles that I employ to win its service to my side are useless as wounded pride, and much more painful.

May the merciful god, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore.

Sleep came slower than a frigid woman.

Even bipolar vampires needed sleep from time to time, and he was well past his recommended safe dosage of stress.