Iris Murdoch Quotes

Sleep and I do not have a good relationship. We have never been good friends. I am constantly chasing sleep and then pushing it away. A good night's sleep is my white whale. Like Ahab, I am also a total drama queen about it. I love to talk about how little sleep I get. I brag about it, as if it is a true indication of how hard I work.

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

Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.

Insomniac is an impassioned work-an inspired amalgam of academic and first-hand research, memoir, analysis, and the kind of obsessive brooding we associate with the insomniac state. Much here is fascinating, and much is upsetting; here is a cri de coeur from a lifetime insomniac that is sure to appeal to the vast army of fellow insomniacs the world over.

Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.

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.

Who sleeps at night? No one is sleeping.
 In the cradle a child is screaming.
 An old man sits over his death, and anyone
 young enough talks to his love, breathes 
into her lips, looks into her eyes.

I'm not very good at going to sleep, and that's probably my worst problem. I don't need much more than seven and a half hours, but I probably get six. I take all my problems to bed with me and fret. I can't switch off.

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

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

Some nights I sleep like a baby. Other nights it's, Oh God, I just came up with a bomb shot.

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

Sleep has no place it can call its own.

Sleep is perverse as human nature, Sleep is perverse as legislature.... So people who go to bed to sleep Must count French premiers or sheep, And people who ought to arise from bed Yawn and go back to sleep instead.

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 closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But it was not until much later that I was able to get any real sleep. In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

When you force sleep, it doesn't happen.

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.

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.

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.

I don't like to sleep. I'm missing something when I'm sleeping.