Jack Gilbert Quotes

We wake in the night, to stereophonic silence.

I hate being awake at three in the morning. It is the godforsaken heart of darkness when the body runs slow, and the brain runs slower, and all you want to do is sleep. But I had promises to keep, and miles to go before I could sleep. Or at least a couple of miracles to perform before I could go to bed.

O polished perturbation! golden care! That keep'st the ports of slumber open wide To many a watchful night.

We stand on the threshold of a twilight-whether morning or evening we do not know. One is followed by the night, the other heralds the dawn.

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.

I am awake a lot of nights.

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

Well does he sleep who knows not that his sleep has been broken.

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

It is the hour of pearl—the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.

He gets into the habit of thinking so passionately at night that he begins to be persecuted by insomnia.

When is the night over? Is it the start of sunrise or the end of it? Is it when you finally go to sleep or simply when you realize that you have to?

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

It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence.

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

How long the night seems to one kept awake by pain.

For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.

I have patches of insomnia, and I'm fascinated by the otherness of the world at night. The stillness. Daytime preoccupations fall away, standards change, thoughts change. It's a canvas for reinvention, I think.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

Night is the mother of counsels.

O sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature's soft nurse, how have I frightened thee, 1710. That thou no more will weigh my eyelids down, And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise. A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense.

Later in the evening when you lie awake in bed with the echoes from the amplifiers ringing in your head.