Ways of Talking about Sleep...

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.
--William Shakespeare

 Oh sleep! It is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole.
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
--John Steinbeck

And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.
--D. H. Lawrence

Now blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep: it covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; 'tis meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. 'Tis the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap; and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise-man even. There is only one thing...that I dislike in sleep; 'tis that it resembles death; there's very little difference between a man in his first sleep, and a man in his last sleep.
--Miguel de Cervantes

To sleep is an act of faith
--Barbara G. Harrison

All men whilst they are awake are in one common world: but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own.
--Plutarch

In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness and we know no death.
--Thomas Wolfe

Sleep... Oh! how I loathe those little slices of death.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.
--Gaston Bachelard