For my part I love sleepy fellows, and the more ignorant the better. Damn your wide-awake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, it... is one of the noblest qualities of humanity. There is something sociable about it, too. Think of those sensible & sociable millions of good fellows all taking a good long friendly snooze together, under the sod--no quarrels, no imaginary grievances, no envies, heart-burnings, & thinking how much better that other chap is off--none of this: but all equally free-&-easy, they sleep away & reel off their nine knots an hour, in perfect amity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
D--n me, stranger, ef you can't stay as long as you please, and I'll give you plenty to eat and drink. Play away, stranger, you ki...n sleep on the dry spot tonight!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Researchers, with science as their authority, will be able to cut [animals] up, alive, into small pieces, drop them from a great h...eight to see if they are shattered by the fall, or deprive them of sleep for sixteen days and nights continuously for the purposes of an iniquitous monograph.... "Animal trust, undeserved faith, when at last will you turn away from us? Shall we never tire of deceiving, betraying, tormenting animals before they cease to trust us?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was continuing to shrink. To become, what? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being, or was I the man of the future?...... So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite, but suddenly I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens. The universe, worlds beyond number, God's silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of man's own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature. That existence begins and ends is man's conception, not nature's, and I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away and in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation--it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest--I meant something, too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist. Even athletes need to sleep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won't let you. S...o you have to get up and make it into something, and then you're allowed to sleep. It's always in the middle of the bloody night, or when you're half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We looked down at a glassy glittering icy place many days walking across and very deep, between enormous icy black peaks. All we l...ooked at had a glassy awfulness that hurt into our dying eyes; and as we peered down over the edge of the miniature valley we were stranded in at the top of the mountain peak, we knew we would never leave it. How could we, weak as we were, descend the ghastly precipices of that peak? And so, for the last time with our old eyes, we sat close and looked into each other's faces, until, one after another, our faces shuttered themselves in death, and our bundles of bones settled inside the heaps of our shag-skin coats, so that, as we slid away from that scene, and saw it with eyes we had not known we possessed, all we could see was what looked like a herd of beasts crouched in sleep or in death high up there on a mountaintop.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So Nature deals with us, and takes away Our playthings one by one, and by the hand... Leads us to rest so gently, that we go Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay, Being too full of sleep to understand How far the unknown transcends the what we know.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tomorrow I will discover Sunset Boulevard. Eurhythmic dancing, ball-room dancing, tap dancing, artistic photography, ordinary phot...ography, lousy photography, electro-fever treatment, internal douche treatment, ultra- violet treatment, elocution lessons, psychic readings, institutes of religion, astrological demonstrations, hands read, feet manicured, elbows massaged, faces lifted, warts removed, fat reduced, insteps raised, corsets fitted, busts vibrated, corns removed, hair dyed, glasses fitted, soda jerked, hangovers cured, headaches driven away, flatulence dissipated, limousines rented, the future made clear, the war made comprehensible, octane made higher and butane lower, drive in and get indigestion, flush the kidneys, get a cheap car-wash, stay-awake pills and go-to-sleep pills, Chinese herbs are very good for you and without a Coca-Cola life is unthinkable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I want to celebrate these elms which have been spared by the plague, these survivors of a once flourishing tribe commemorated by a...ll the Elm Streets in America. But to celebrate them is to be silent about the people who sit and sleep underneath them, the homeless poor who are hauled away by the city like trash, except it has no place to dump them. To speak of one thing is to suppress another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know. What falls away is always. And is near.... I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »