Sarah Dessen Quotes

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

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 write because I can’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.

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.

My own eyes try to sleep, but they don't. They stay wide awake as time snarls forward and silence drops down, like measured thought.

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?

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.

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 have trouble sleeping maybe one night a year. On that special night, I get up and read on the couch until I fall asleep.

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

I don't sleep. I wait. I sleep in cars and on couches. I sleep when I can, but when I can't sleep, I just don't, so I figure there's a higher calling keeping me on point that night.

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.

I just can't sleep tonight knowing that things ain't right.

Who can wrestle against Sleep? - Yet is that giant very gentleness.

I can't sleep. There is a woman stuck between my eyelids. I would tell her to get out if I could. But there is a woman stuck in my throat

I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry. Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.

Meanwhile the 3 a.m. drunks of the world would lay in their beds, trying in vain to sleep, and deserving that rest, if they could find it.

There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.

When sleep leaves the body like smoke and man, sated with secrets, drives the overworked nag of quarrel out of its stall, then the fire-breathing union begins anew . . .

I was never going to get any sleep. I was going to have Alice in Wonderland conversation after Alice in Wonderland conversation until I died of exhaustion. Here, in the restful, idyllic Victorian era.

I've been waiting for sleep to offer up the day with both hands.