“Time for bed.” I held my fist out. One by one, my flock stacked theirs on top, and then we headed up into the trees to sleep the sleep of the innocent. Well, okay, maybe not so innocent. But the sleep of the much less guilty than others, for sure.”

“Now, sprawled comfortably in his motel bed, Anson Sharp enjoyed the sleep of the amoral, which is far deeper and more restful than the sleep of the just, the righteous, and the innocent.”

“I was in my bed trying to figure out why sometimes you can wake up and go back to sleep and other times you can't”

“I sleep all day. Noises flit around the house- garbage truck in the alley, rain, tree rapping against the bedroom window. I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing, refusing. Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion. [...] It is afternoon, it is night, it is morning. Everything is reduced to this bed, this endless slumber that makes the days into one day, makes time stop, stretches and compacts time until it is meaningless.”

“Do you sleep in a coffin?” Okay, I admit that one was a little out of line, not to mention corny.“Of course not,” he laughs loudly. “I sleep in a bed.” A pause. “Would you like to see it?”

“And so I learned that familiar paths traced in the dusk of summer evenings may lead as well to prison as to innocent untroubled sleep.”