“Saturday 12 July 1823 [Halifax]Could not sleep last night. Dozing, hot & disturbed ... a violent longing for a female companion came over me. Never remember feeling it so painfully before ... It was absolute pain to me.”

“And even though I’d cried in my bed every night since, feeling his phantom arms around me, it had been worth eight hours Saturday night. The pleasure then was worth the pain now.”

“Scarlet was in pain all night because she wouldn’t let me sleep with her.”

“Respect pain. If we could truly imagine pain we don't feel, we would not survive a day, so we don't imagine it, we can't, and that indispensable glitch in the human machine is also ironically what lets us inflict pain on others at little cost to a good night's sleep.”

“Cycling is so hard, the suffering is so intense, that it’s absolutely cleansing. The pain is so deep and strong that a curtain descends over your brain….Once; someone asked me what pleasure I took in riding for so long. ‘PLEASURE???? I said.’ ‘I don’t understand the question.’ I didn’t do it for the pleasure; I did it for the pain.”

“Oh, the terrible struggle that I have had against sleep so often of late; the pain of the sleeplessness, or the pain of the fear of sleep, and with such unknown horror as it has for me! How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.”