There are things that take a long time to acquire. Friends. Love. Really, nothing has been a waste.

Sleep is like a fickle lover: one moment, it is warm and inviting; the next, cold and unattainable.

Then Night came down like the feathery soot of a smoky lamp, and smutted 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.

(…) one of the most unendurable aspects of such an interlude was the inability to sleep (…) the disruption of normal sleep patterns is a notoriously devastating feature of depression (…). It had become clear that I would never be granted even a few minutes’ relief from my full-time exhaustion.

There are some nights when
sleep plays coy,
aloof and disdainful.
And all the wiles
that I employ to win
its service to my side
are useless as wounded pride,
and much more painful.

In the January that I turned thirty-five, sleep became a foreign and hostile country. I had never been more than what one might call a refugee in the country of sleep.

Sleep is like the tide only this time the moon doesn’t bring it in.

Do you know that awesome feeling when you get into bed, fall right asleep, stay asleep all night and wake up feeling refreshed? Me neither.

Sleep is like the unicorn – it is rumored to exist, but I doubt I will see any.

Sometimes I’ll lie awake at night and listen to the sound of the clock. The motor ticks on endlessly. What an unsettling sound it is when you’ve yet to find peace – to find solace. Sometimes no matter how exhausted my body is, no matter how tired my thoughts are, no matter how sore my brain and my heart are…even then I still can’t fall asleep. Sometimes I wish for nothing more than to sleep. Please, allow me to slip away into the darkest corners of the world and let me be. Just let me sleep. You can close your eyes to the surroundings, but you can’t close your ears off to the sound around it. And sometimes the things you wish the most not to hear – are the loudest. They will not go away in the night and be silenced.

You never know how much you truly appreciate sleep until it’s snatched away from you.

Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye,
And where care lodges, sleep will never lie.

Refuse to settle for something less than the best. You need to track it down and get it, honey.

Good barbers, like good friends, are hard to find… but not impossible.

The reason ‘closure’ is a cliche is that it is used too often, too imprecisely, and doesn’t in any case reflect reality. In reality, such closure in broken friendships and much else in life is rarely achieved; only death brings closure and then not always for those still living.

I don’t believe you ever get closure on anything. Things leave a permanent mark on you.