34 Inspiring Insomnia Quotes

In the silent hours when the world sleeps, those grappling with insomnia often find themselves enveloped in thoughts, creativity, and reflection. While the night can sometimes seem endless, it also offers a unique canvas for introspection and inspiration. Whether you're searching for comfort or a kindred spirit, turning to words of wisdom can be a powerful reminder that you are not alone in your wakefulness. Our curated collection of 34 inspiring insomnia quotes seeks to illuminate the quiet moments of your night, providing solace and perhaps a fresh perspective for those long, wakeful hours. Dive into this collection and discover how poets, thinkers, and dreamers have captured the essence of insomnia, transforming sleeplessness into a source of insight and creativity.

1. “The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.” - Leonard Cohen

2. “It's a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.” - Tracy Chevalier

3. “I am strongly of the opinion that, after the age of twenty-one, a man ought not to be out of bed and awake at four in the morning. The hour breeds thought. At twenty-one, life being all future, it may be examined with impunity. But, at thirty, having become an uncomfortable mixture of future and past, it is a thing to be looked at only when the sun is high and the world full of warmth and optimism.” - P. G. Wodehouse

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

5. “I fix the cramped, lined pageswith my curious stare. How do youcome to exist?” - Kiera Woodhull

6. “InsomniaI cannot get to sleep tonight.I toss and turn and flop.I try to count some fluffy sheepwhile o'er a fence they hop.I try to think of pleasant dreamsof places really cool.I don't know why I cannot sleep -I slept just fine at school.” - Kathy Kenney-Marshall

7. “That's the advantage of insomnia. People who go to be early always complain that the night is too short, but for those of us who stay up all night, it can feel as long as a lifetime. You get a lot done” - Banana Yoshimoto

8. “I only sleep with people I love, which is why I have insomnia.” - Emilie Autumn

9. “I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.” - david benioff

10. “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?” - Emilie Autumn

11. “Then Night came down like the feathery soot of a smoky lamp, and smutted[9] first the bedquilt, then the hearth-rug, then the window-seat, and then at last the great, stormy, faraway outside world. But sleep did not come. Oh, no! Nothing new came at all except that particularly wretched, itching type of insomnia which seems to rip away from one's body the whole kind, protecting skin and expose all the raw, ticklish fretwork of nerves to the mercy of a gritty blanket or a wrinkled sheet. Pain came too, in its most brutally high night-tide; and sweat, like the smother of furs in summer; and thirst like the scrape of hot sand-paper; and chill like the clammy horror of raw fish.” - Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

12. “sleep is such a luxury, which i cant afford.” - Robin Sikarwar

13. “Sleep comes more easily than it returns.” - Victor Hugo

14. “There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,committed or endured or suspected; there are worse thingsthan not being able to sleep for thinking about them.It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking inand stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.” - Fleur Adcock

15. “I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness that I'd practically invented.” - Sarah Dessen

16. “I feel as though whenever I create something, my Mr. Hyde wakes up in the middle of the night and starts thrashing it. I sometimes love it the next morning, but other times it is an abomination.” - Criss Jami

17. “It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.” - Kim Stanley Robinson

18. “He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.” - Vladimir Nabokov

19. “Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre.” - Andy Behrman

20. “An intensely gripping narrative...expertly crafted and totally addictive...a must read!” - Maggie Reese

21. “A 2002 Oxford study showed counting sheep actually delays the onset of sleep. It's just too dull to stop us from worrying about jobs and spouses” - A. J. Jacobs

22. “The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep.” - W.C. Fields

23. “Women can go mad with insomnia.The sleep-deprived roam houses that have lost their familiarity. With tea mugs in hand, we wander rooms, looking on shelves for something we will recognize: a book title, a photograph, the teak-carved bird -- a souvenir from what place? A memory almost rises when our eyes rest on a painting's grey sweep of cloud, or the curve of a wooden leg in a corner. Fingertips faintly recall the raised pattern on a chair cushion, but we wonder how these things have come to be here, in this stranger's home.Lost women drift in places where time has collapsed. We look into our thoughts and hearts for what has been forgotten, for what has gone missing. What did we once care about? Whom did we love? We are emptied. We are remote. Like night lilies, we open in the dark, breathe in the shadowy world. Our soliloquies are heard by no one.” - Cathy Ostlere

24. “When I can't sleep I count the buckles on my straightjacket.” - Cathie Linz

25. “I also turn to homeopathic remedies for the treatment of indigestion, travel sickness, insomnia and hay fever just to name a few. Homeopathy offers a safe, natural alternative that causes no side effects or drug interactions.” - Cindy Crawford

26. “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.” - Marina Tsvetaeva

27. “Tonight - I am alone in the night,a homeless and sleepless nun!Tonight I hold all the keys to thisthe only capital cityand lack of sleep guides me on my path.You are so lovely, my dusky Kremlin!Tonight I put my lips to the breastof the whole round and warring earth.Now I feel hair - like fur - standing on end:the stifling winds blow straight into my soul.Tonight I feel compassion for everyone,those who are pitied, along with those who are kissed.” - Marina Tsvetaeva

28. “After a sleepless night the body gets weaker,It becomes dear and not yours - and nobody's.Just like a seraph you smile to peopleAnd arrows moan in the slow arteries.After a sleepless night the arms get weakerAnd deeply equal to you are the friend and foe.Smells like Florence in the frost, and in eachSudden sound is the whole rainbow.Tenderly light the lips, and the shadow's goldenNear the sunken eyes. Here the night has sparkedThis brilliant likeness - and from the dark nightOnly just one thing - the eyes - are growing dark.” - Marina Tsvetaeva

29. “Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had strength to rouse up, you’d slaughter your half-dreams with buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that’s burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead – And wasn’t it true, had he read somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 A.M. than at any other time...” - Ray Bradbury

30. “Insomniacs should not be forced to exist in a realm with reflective glass. From the first look I’m boxed in a prism, rainbows charming the other dark-circled self into sharing my prison. One eye turns on the other, each accusing the other of being responsible for an appearance oddly elfin, before exiting head and bouncing like lottery balls through the mirror walls and then drifting up and out the open and unguarded Well of the Wyrd. There, everyone with mirrors and mushrooms is waiting for me, faded and dissolved into giggles.” - Amanda Sledz

31. “The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.” - Helen Bevington

32. “Sooner or later everything you thought you'd left behind comes around again. For good or ill, it comes around again.” - Stephen King

33. “But Mr. Hale resolved that he would not be disturbed by any such nonsensical idea; so he lay awake, determining not to think about it.” - Elizabeth Gaskell

34. “I'm so exhausted and yet I feel like I'll never sleep again.” - Maya Banks