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71e9edf
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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.
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sleeplessness
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Ernest Hemingway |
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0518c5c
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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...
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sleeplessness
night
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Ray Bradbury |
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091c699
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For there is nothing quite so terror-inducing as the loss of sleep. It creates phantoms and doubts, causes one to questions one's own abilities and judgement, and, over time, dismantles, from within, the body.
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sleep
sleepless
sleeplessness
insomnia
terror
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Charlie Huston |
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3d20d85
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Something amazing happens when the rest of the world is sleeping. I am glued to my chair. I forget that I ever wanted to do anything but write. The crowded city, the crowded apartment, and the crowded calendar suddenly seem spacious. Three or four hours pass in a moment; I have no idea what time it is, because I never check the clock. If I chose to listen, I could hear the swish of taxis bound for downtown bars or the soft saxophone riffs that drift from a neighbor's window, but nothing gets through. I am suspended in a sensory deprivation tank, and the very lack of sensation is delicious.
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sensory-deprivation
sleeplessness
night
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Anne Fadiman |
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9e12769
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Isn't this a nice time of night to walk? I like to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise.
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sleeplessness
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Ray Bradbury |
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8fdc7db
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And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time.
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ocean-of-sound
sleeplessness
sound
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Ray Bradbury |
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772ca13
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After counting all the sheep in the world I enumerate the wildebeests, snails, camels, skylarks, etc., then I add up all the zoos and aquariums, country by country. By early light I am asleep in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood,
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nights
flood
sleeplessness
noah
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Billy Collins |