"Sleepless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... their marriage! He threw himself on his bed, and passed some sleepless hours. Then fatigue had its way. When he awoke, there was a gray dawn in the room, and he was conscious of something pressing against his bed. Half asleep, he raised himself and saw Kitty, in a long white dressing-gown, sitting curled up on the floor, or rather on a pillow, her head resting ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sleepless night of intense anxiety on the part of the prisoners, and, as has been said, more than one unavailing effort to elude the vigilance of their guards, the morning dawned of the day which was to see ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... capital, where the rabble were singing the terrible songs of bloody Paris. Agents of the Revolution had come from France and so "contaminated," as he says, "the greater part of the province" that he kept order only "at the cost of sleepless nights, by frightening some, punishing others, and driving several out of the colony." It looks as though Suzanne had caught a touch of dis-relish for les aristocrates, whose necks the songs of the day were promising to the lampposts. ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... I think of your position—and even my own. Mine own has risen like a palace in a dream, and may vanish like one. But that would not be a calamity if you were safe. If I quitted this world to-morrow, where would you be? It gives me sleepless nights and anxious days. If you really loved me as you say, you would save me this. I am haunted with the perpetual thought that all this glittering prosperity will vanish as it did with our father. God forbid that, under any circumstances, it should lead to such ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... subject of the most infernal malignity. When a man of robust and vigorous constitution has a fit of sickness, it produces a more powerful effect, than the same indisposition upon a delicate valetudinarian. Such was the case with Miss Melville. She passed the succeeding night sleepless and uneasy, and was found in the morning with a high fever. Her distemper resisted for the present all attempts to assuage it, though there was reason to hope that the goodness of her constitution, assisted by tranquillity and the kindness of those about her, would ultimately surmount ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... trouble maker is dirt—dirt on the dish-towel, dirt on the nipple, dirt in the milk, dirt on the mother's hands. Dirt is an ever present evil and an endless trouble maker, as evidenced by stool disturbances, indigestion, fretful days, and sleepless nights. A dirty refrigerator is another factor which has been responsible for much ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... soil I kept, and in this garden fine cabbages grow. Year after year the whole crop is sliced up, put into great barrels, and converted into sauer-kraut. This they send after me, wherever I happen to be—whether at New York, Rio de Janeiro, Palermo, or Paris—and from this, after a sleepless night, my wife prepares me a delicious 'Korhely-leves'" (a broth made from the juice, and some slices of cabbage, with sour cream and fresh and smoked ham, and sausages. This broth is in Hungary frequently served after a night of dissipation; ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... doctor recorded the case among his cures; but in his treatment he did not reckon the sleepless hours that that country doctor had sat by the patient's bedside, the unremitting struggle he had made, holding Death at bay, inspiring hope, and holding ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... the great imprints of Joe Lorey's hob-nailed boots, quite as she suspected. Long before the sun had risen the young mountaineer, distressed by worries which had made his night an almost sleepless one, had risen and wandered from his little cabin, lonelier in its far solitude, even than the girl's. For a time he had crouched upon a stump beneath the morning stars with lowering brows, sunk deep in harsh, resentful thought, forgetful ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... known, it would have saved me sleepless nights. For now you're mine, my dearest, just as I am yours. Nothing can ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... upon the soil and a hundred religions have decayed, leaving the old air heavy with exhalations—this India slowly takes shape in Mr Kipling's native stories. Her physical immensity and pressure is felt in stories like The End of the Passage and William the Conqueror. Her sleepless tyranny, which has made men intricate and incalculable, driving them to subterranean ways of thought and fancy, rules in every page of a tale like The Return of Imray. Imray was an amiable Englishman who incautiously patted ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... She passed near the deserted Town Hall, which was now used as a warehouse. The outer walls still remained, but the beautiful interior wood-work had been sold and removed. That is how it is with me, thought Ella. She flew along as fast as she could, onward to sleepless nights and ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... admitted the difficulty of bringing back the operations of the Government to the construction of the Constitution set up in 1798, and marked it as an admonitory proof of the necessity of guarding that instrument with sleepless vigilance against the authority of precedents which had not the sanction of its ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... than they used to be. His nerves, too, have suffered: he cannot even now see a surplice hanging on a door quite unmoved, and the spectacle of a scarecrow in a field late on a winter afternoon has cost him more than one sleepless night. ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... loved the roomy, bare house, with its uncurtained windows facing the mountains, and revealing the spectacles of the day and night. Because of them she had learned to make the most of her sleepless hours. The slow, majestic procession in the heavens, the hours of tumult when the moon struggled through the troubled sky, the dawns with their swift, wide-spreading clarity, were the finest diversions ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... collection of illusions about herself. She believed that she was a very light sleeper; that the slightest noise woke her, and that she would then lie for hours wide-eyed. Indeed she frequently declared that she did her best mental work during "the sleepless hours of ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... her candle, and in haste retired. Caroline, sensible that all her ladyship's anger at this moment arose from warm affection, was the more sorry to have occasioned it, and to feel that she could not, by yielding, allay it instantly.—A sleepless night. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... the most perfect enjoyment. M. Colbert seemed gifted with ubiquity. In the morning there were the accounts of the previous night's expenses to settle; during the day, programmes, essays, enrolments, payments. M. Colbert had amassed four millions of francs, and dispersed them with sleepless economy. He was horrified at the expenses which mythology involved; not a wood nymph, nor a dryad, that cost less than a hundred francs a day! The dress alone amounted to three hundred francs. The expense of powder and sulphur for fireworks amounted, every night, to a hundred thousand ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... teetotaller in the kingdom would scarce have forbidden him a glass of our fifty-year-old Madeira. But even the fifty-year-old Madeira proved no specific in the case. He was suffering under excruciating headache, and had to stretch himself in his bed, with eyes shut but sleepless, waiting till the fit should pass,—every pulse that beat in his temples ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... smell of wine from his mouth, by the flabby tiredness and listlessness of his skin. Like when someone, who has eaten and drunk far too much, vomits it back up again with agonising pain and is nevertheless glad about the relief, thus this sleepless man wished to free himself of these pleasures, these habits and all of this pointless life and himself, in an immense burst of disgust. Not until the light of the morning and the beginning of the first activities in the street before his city-house, he had slightly fallen ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... came before me, The bright green fields I loved so well, Ere SORROW threw his shadow o'er me, The streamlet, mountain, wood and dell; The lonely grave-yard, sad and dreary, Which in the night I passed with dread, Where, with their sleepless vigils weary, The white stones watch above ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... "Trilby," tramping "is not all beer and skittles." Your true tramp learns to take things as he finds them and never to expect or ask or the impossible. He will drink the wine of the country, even when sour, without a grimace; pass without grumbling a sleepless night; plod through dust ankle deep, without a murmur; there is but one vulnerable feature in his armor, and with Achilles, it is his heel! And it is literally the heel that, is the sensitive spot. I will venture the assertion that the long-distance ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... Sleepless midnight hours come inevitably to each of us, when the creaking gates of subterranean passages far down in our consciousness open of themselves, and ghostly inhabitants steal out of awful vaults ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... table. Soon was he ware of a spring, in a hollow land, and the rushes grew thickly round it, and dark swallow-wort, and green maiden-hair, and blooming parsley, and deer-grass spreading through the marshy land. In the midst of the water the nymphs were arraying their dances, the sleepless nymphs, dread goddesses of the country people, Eunice, and Malis, and Nycheia, with her April eyes. And now the boy was holding out the wide-mouthed pitcher to the water, intent on dipping it, but the nymphs all clung to his hand, for love of the Argive lad had fluttered the soft hearts ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... redeemed, amid the host Of chanting angels, in some transient lull Of the eternal anthem, heard the cry Of its lost darling, whom in evil hour Some wilder pulse of nature led astray And left an outcast in a world of fire, Condemned to be the sport of cruel fiends, Sleepless, unpitying, masters of the skill To wring the maddest ecstasies of pain From worn-out souls that only ask to die, Would it not long to leave the bliss of Heaven, Bearing a little water in its hand To moisten those poor lips that plead in vain With Him we call our ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the boat; a large party of ladies and gentlemen, who accompany them to do a last handshaking on board. For, in quitting California, the ex-haciendado leaves many friends behind; among them, some who will pass sleepless hours thinking of Carmen Montijo; and others whose hearts will be sore as their ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... the secret, however, the more piquant the situation for one who was in it; and there were moments of a sleepless night in which Langholm found nothing new to regret. But he was in a quandary none the less. He could scarcely meet Mrs. Steel again without a word about the prospective story, which they had so often discussed together, and upon which he was at last free to embark; nor could he touch upon that ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... a sleepless night, Truxton King made his first determined attempt to escape. All night long he had lain there thinking of the horrid thing that was to happen on the black 26th. He counted the days, the hours, the minutes. Morning brought the 23d. Only three days ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... quietly as before in the cheerful, smoke-filled room, I puffing slightly at my Ajar, and Tom's sleepless eyes fixed absently on the wall; and then presently I went to the window and watched the dull gray dawn creep over ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... a sleepless night," she told me. "It must have been hard to keep awake after all the work you have done in the ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... meant hunger, and heroism, and sleepless hours of endurance. It seemed strange that to Lenichen it should seem nothing more than a ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... night, Harriet knew, for she herself was sleepless, and she could see from the upper balcony that a stream of golden light was pouring across the brilliant flowers beneath the ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... obtained by stripping the Greek "beast" of every pagan beauty and then decking it out with crude Oriental ornament. But who that prizes the peculiar product of that fanaticism would have had its cradle without this sleepless terror, lest for the whole world of classic heathendom it should lose the dear-bought soul of purely Christian ideals? Or who, remembering that in thus relentlessly sacrificing its entire heritage of pagan accumulation it put ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... perfectly aware that fear, and a sickening kind of repulsion, formed a very large element in his emotions. For nearly two hours, unless three persons had lied consummately, he—his essential being, that sleepless self that underlies all—had been in strange company, had become identified in some horrible manner with the soul of a dead person. It was as if he had been informed some morning that he had slept all night with a corpse under his bed. He woke half a dozen times ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... articles with infinite satisfaction, before instructing his followers how to deal with it. "But time must not be wasted," said he in a moment. "I believe the ogre to be a very sleepless creature, and he may soon rise to wander after his usual ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... of his bundle. Completing the last, he looked up, and the glare in his eyes haunted her through many a sleepless night. ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... forlorn look of those who had great interests at stake gradually wore off; business was as brisk as in the old times, and the Custom-house was being worked with a promptitude hitherto unknown in the Islands. There were no more sleepless nights, fearing an attack from the dreaded rebel or the volunteer. The large majority of foreign (including Spanish) and half-caste Manila merchants showed a higher appreciation of American protection than of ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... gave it to her, might be gradually brought to a genuine sense of appreciation and gratitude to the city which supplies her little children with a Kindergarten, or, to the Board of Health which properly placarded a case of scarlet-fever next door and spared her sleepless nights and wearing anxiety, as well as the money paid with such difficulty to the doctor and the druggist. The man who in his emotional gratitude almost kneels before his political friend who gets his boy out of jail, might be made ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... necessary to clothe, rear, educate and care for a family of ten orphans of soldiers, and bring them up to maturity, if she would furnish the motherly love, the years of hard labor and self-sacrifice, the sleepless nights and endless patience needed for the work. After a few days of prayerful consideration she accepted, and in the fall of 1865 ten orphans were gathered together in Indianapolis from various parts of the State from among those who had no ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... shock an a sleepless night, was spared the more harrowing details of the coroner's visit and the subsequent jaunty activities of Mr. Lyken and his ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... a sleepless night, broken twice by the merciless call of the watch, a peep of daylight struggled into view from above, and someone came below. It was my old ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... of his spirit; but with him they did not penetrate to the inmost core of his nature. Literature occupied him long and earnestly; but, while Alexander could not sleep for thinking of the Homeric Achilles, Caesar in his sleepless hours mused on the inflections of the Latin nouns and verbs. He made verses, as everybody then did, but they were weak; on the other hand he was interested in subjects of astronomy and natural science. While wine was and continued to be with Alexander the destroyer of care, the temperate ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... rushed into the dining-room—"I have to go, nurse. Fardy can't have his breakfast with you!"—and rushed out. A minute previously he had felt a serious need of food after the long, sleepless morning. The need vanished. He scurried up Elm Park Gardens like a boy in the warm, fresh air, and stopped a taxi. He was extremely excited. None but Lois knew the great secret. He had kept it to himself. He might have burst into the kitchen—for he was very apt to be informal—and said: "Well, ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... in passing that Bert had been confined to his room all day Sunday as the result of a fall or an accident of some sort. Monday morning, while still suffering from the effects of his spree, Bob had returned to the city to find his home deserted, and for twenty- four sleepless hours now he had been hunting for his wife. He had called up Lorelei's family, but they could give him no clue; nor could he find trace of her in any other quarter. So, as a last resort before calling in the police, he had come to Pope. When he had ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... had just killed another deer, and the wild fowl flew around us in abundance, we pitched the tent, and halted for several hours, and refreshed ourselves with sleep, after the irritation and almost sleepless nights that we had endured. We were on the march again at five o'clock; and after we had forded Stoney River, we came upon the track of a polar bear. The Indian hunter was very keen in his desire to fall in with it, and I lamented that I had not an opportunity of ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... barricade the door during the night, and thus hold the doctors and attendants at bay until those in authority had accepted my ultimatum, which was to include a Thanksgiving visit at home. But before morning I had slightly altered my plan. My sleepless night of activity had made me ravenously hungry, and I decided that it would be wiser not only to fill my stomach, but to lay by other supplies of food before submitting to a siege. Accordingly I set things to rights and went about my business the next morning as ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... William II, aged 29, a mighty man in the making, a sleepless man, one who in his time was to become the standard by which henceforth all German institutions are to be measured. His first address to the army; his second, to the navy; his third, three days ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... his blond mustache and wavy hair in the little round mirror left by his predecessor. Now, every evening before leaving, he would look at his white mustache and bald head in the same mirror. Forty years had rolled by, long and rapid, dreary as a day of sadness and as similar as the hours of a sleepless night. Forty years of which nothing remained, not even a memory, not even a misfortune, since the death of his ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... beds of pain, Seek for ease, but seek in vain; Ye, whose swollen and sleepless eyes Watch to see ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... only part of myself that writes and thinks, the greater part is always with Aniela. At this moment I see a streak of light from her window resting on the barberry bushes. My poor love has sleepless nights too. I saw her dozing over her needle-work to-day. Seated in a deep armchair she looked to me so small, and she drew such a long breath as if from weariness. I had a feeling for her as if she were ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... began to experience anxious days and sleepless nights, and Mrs. Brandon begged of Edward to reform. Often he would do so. He would sign that pledge; but it was like an attempt to stay a torrent with a straw. That pledge! 'twas nothing! ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... King to remain during the Christmas festival. They accepted the invitation, but the Knight Gustavus was not to be moved to come to the King's table or any other place where the Queen was to be found. The Christmas approached. One Sunday evening, Gustavus was disconsolate; the Knight was long sleepless, and at daybreak he went into the church, to the tomb of his ancestress, St. Bridget. There he saw, at a few paces from him, a female kneeling before Philippa's tomb. It was the Queen he saw; their eyes met, and Gustavus hastened away. ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... inwardly. This was just the information for which she was seeking. It was then a little after nine. She felt tired and worn from her almost sleepless night, and her appearance showed it. When she told the nurse that she intended to take a stroll, and get some air, the latter nodded. "Dr. Hartmann has recommended it," she said. "He is a great believer in the value of fresh air." The ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... himself to be the son of Helios; and all round dwell countless tribes of Colchians; and he might match himself with Ares in his dread war-cry and giant strength. Nay, to seize the fleece in spite of Aeetes is no easy task; so huge a serpent keeps guard round and about it, deathless and sleepless, which Earth herself brought forth on the sides of Caucasus, by the rock of Typhaon, where Typhaon, they say, smitten by the bolt of Zeus, son of Cronos, when he lifted against the god his sturdy hands, dropped from his head hot gore; and in such plight he reached the mountains and plain of ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... nothing. So they despatched a messenger-boy up town in post-haste with a note saying that "the firm" had decided to let the matter drop. Although, perhaps, it would have been better to have given him one sleepless night at least. ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... For a moment he stood as if turned to stone. Unable to weep, he again mounted his horse and sought a peasant's house to pass the night. There he heard the story of Angelica's infatuation, and saw the bracelet she had left them in return for their hospitality. The unhappy Orlando passed a sleepless night, weeping and groaning, and the next morning hastened to the forest that he might give way to his grief unobserved. There madness came upon him, and he uprooted the hateful trees, cut the solid stone of the grotto with ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... enlisted. It was at a war-meeting at the town-hall last evening. You have known his feelings, and perhaps will not be surprised. I did not expect it, and must confess I was very much shaken in spirit by it. But, arriving through some sleepless hours at a calmer mood, I do not know that it is any greater sacrifice than we as a family ought ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... I have been inconsistent in the opinions that I have held and advocated upon questions of public concern, would not disturb me by day, nor consign me to sleepless nights. ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... that conversation with my mother remains in my memory as the most wretched I had hitherto endured; and yet how many sleepless nights had I passed, while all the world around me slept, in bitter conflict with a thought which held mine eyes waking and devoured my heart! I was like a prisoner who has sounded every inch of his dungeon—the walls, the floor, the ceiling—and who, on shaking the bars ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... happens in Turkey it will be on you that public displeasure will fall, and you may need a bridge for yourselves and not find one. I croak like a raven. Perhaps you may set it down to an almost totally sleepless night." ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... should be sorry to be otherwise than amiable, but sleepless nights and solitary confinement must necessarily affect one's temper. I can only say I do not ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... observed that while some of them are referable to the cord the greater number are referable to the brain. They usually include a feeling of general weakness, nervousness, and inability to concentrate the attention on work or on business matters. The patient is sleepless, or his sleep is disturbed by terrifying dreams. His memory is defective, or rather selective, as he can usually recall the circumstances of the accident with clearness and accuracy. He becomes irritable and emotional, complains of sensations of weight or fullness in the head, of ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... let her admit, even to herself, that she had failed to attract at the final moment. But there was something deeper than her pride involved, and she found her days restless and her nights sleepless. One night in the dense darkness she faced the truth relentlessly. "You're in love, Cissy Beale," she told herself, scornfully. "You're in love for the first time ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... It was not until he tried to go to sleep that her image came back to him, and all his blasted hopes arose to mock at him. What a fool he had been! How utterly insane all his fantasies seemed to him now! So he passed another sleepless night, and it was not till daylight that he ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... heavens must at last be empty of water, but still it poured down, straight and heavy, with a maddening iteration, on the iron roof. Everything was damp and clammy. There was mildew on the walls and on the boots that stood on the floor. Through the sleepless nights the mosquitoes droned ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... standing by him now, dressed in a brown robe with a dead man cut in ivory like to that," and he pointed to the crucifix in Jacob's hands, "and he holds the ivory man above him and threatens him with sleepless centuries of sorrow, when he is also one of those spirits in ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... Drummond presented himself. His face showed the effects of a sleepless night, but he was already refortified with jackass brandy for the ordeals of the day, ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... thou wilt hang above my bed, When life is ebbing low; Of doubt, impatience, and of gloom, The jealous, sleepless foe. ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... reflection rode he home to his sleepless couch. Some part of those dark hours he spent in bitter reviling of Wilding, of himself, and even of his sister, whom he blamed for this awful situation into which he had tumbled; at other times he wept ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... way. When he entered the hospital in May, 1908, he was in a cocaine period and was taking the enormous dose of one hundred and eighty grains of cocaine every day. In the hospital they withdrew the drug altogether. During the first weeks, he was entirely sleepless. They energetically refused him any substitutes and after six weeks he began to feel comfortable. He gained steadily in weight and after three months, when he left, he had gained fifty pounds, felt entirely comfortable, and seemed in all respects ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... the camper-out is unconsciously seeking. We grow weary of our luxuries and conveniences. We react against our complex civilization, and long to get back for a time to first principles. We cheerfully endure wet, cold, smoke, mosquitoes, black flies, and sleepless nights, just to touch naked reality ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... was gone, the sultan fell into a reverie on the advantages and disadvantages of his bear learning to read. When he went to bed, the same train of thought kept him awake; and after a sleepless night, he sent early in the morning for the patriarch. The venerable Mar Yusef lost no time in obeying the summons. Taking his patriarchal staff in his hand, and followed by his two deacons with their heads bare, and their hands crossed on their bosoms, he silently ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... the day when Frank was arrested on the embezzlement charge. The old man, through Frank, who had it from Steger, knew it was coming, still had the courage to go to the bank but it was like struggling under the weight of a heavy stone to do it. But before going, and after a sleepless night, he wrote his resignation to Frewen Kasson, the chairman of the board of directors, in order that he should be prepared to hand it to him, at once. Kasson, a stocky, well-built, magnetic man of fifty, breathed an inward sigh of relief at the ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... wailed. "It is the spoiling of my combination, on which I have wasted sleepless nights. A curse on my mad folly. Do you know who the ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... tossed sleepless, for what she had just passed through had so thorougly possessed her imagination that, ever as her wearied brain was sinking under the waves of sleep, up rose the face of Richard from its depths, deathlike, with matted ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... carelessly dangling a similar feminine trinket, I shudder involuntarily: there comes back to me the memory of a girl's puzzled eyes under the brim of a flopping hat, the haunting suspicion of the sleepless nights ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... he had seen what havoc had been wrought within the past two or three days. There were the same proud and handsome features, but they were pale and worn, and there was a piteous and weary look in the eyes that told of the trouble and heartrending of sleepless nights. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... wings of the dark, the night throbs with mystic presences; the hills glimmer with an inward life; whispering voices hurry through the air. Another and magical land awakes in the dark, full of a living restlessness; sleepless as the ever-moving sea. Everywhere through the night-shrouded woods, the shadowy trees seem to interrupt their secret whispers till you are gone past. There is no sense of loneliness anywhere, but rather a host of teeming lives on every hand, palpable though hidden, remote from us though touching ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... of less: as, house, houseless; death, deathless; sleep, sleepless; bottom, bottomless. These denote privation or exemption—the absence of what is named by ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... has been too deep asleep, as I explain the thing; drowsiness has gained his little people, they have gone stumbling and maundering through their parts; and the play, to the awakened mind, is seen to be a tissue of absurdities. And yet how often have these sleepless Brownies done him honest service, and given him, as he sat idly taking his pleasure in the boxes, better tales than he could fashion ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with many thanks, refusing all offers of nursing help with a quiet "He'd rather have me," but accepting gratefully broths and milk and anything of that sort the homestead could furnish. "Nothing ever knocks me out," he reiterated, and dragged on through sleepless days and nights, as the days dragged by finding ample reward in the knowledge that "he'd rather have me", and when there came that deep word of praise from his stricken comrade: "A good mate's harder to find than a good wife," his gentle, ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... little cry my fingers interlaced with his and words died on my lips. As quietly as if no fight had been fought, no sleepless nights endured, no surrender made at cost of pride beyond computing, he answered me, but in his face was that which made me turn my face away, and in silence I clung to him. The room grew still, so still we could hear each other's ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... I glanced at Elsin Grey where she rode a pace or so ahead of me, her fair head bent, her face composed but colorless as the lace drooping from her stock. The fatigue of a sleepless night was telling on her, though as yet the reaction of the strain had not affected me ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... o'clock when he called the "watch below." Lily was still wrapped in slumber, worn out by her sleepless night, and by the excitement of her novel position. After charging Cyd to keep awake, assuring him that "eternal vigilance was the price of liberty," Dan went into the cabin to obtain the rest he so much needed. He slept soundly, and, no doubt, dreamed strange things; but ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... not sleep,' was the unanswerable argument with which he refuted the sleepless nights of ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... not now trouble you. I think I see light ahead, and the great result of these difficulties, I am persuaded, will be a great economy in laying the telegraphic conductors.... I am well in health but have sleepless nights from the great anxieties and cares which weigh ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... it became clear to our girls that a change of programme was a necessity. Ruth had by no means recovered from her shock and the sleepless night that followed, and some of the comforts of invalidism must be found for her. At the same time she utterly repudiated the idea of Saratoga, which was now urged upon her; it had lost its charms; neither would she ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... those frightful ideas, and avoid such topics of discourse for the future. The more she endeavoured to banish them, the more troublesome they became; and such was her infatuation, that as her terrors increased, her thirst after that sort of knowledge was augmented. Many sleepless nights did she pass amidst those horrors of fancy, starting at every noise, and sweating with dreary apprehension, yet ashamed to own her fears, or solicit the comfort of a bedfellow, lest she should incur the ridicule and censure of her father's wife; ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... his comfortable and beautiful bedroom another trial. The result of the second experiment was a repetition of the result of the first. Again he felt the all-pervading sense of depression and discomfort. Again he passed a sleepless night. And once more, when he tried to eat his breakfast, his ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... odds, with sleepless nights and fasting days sapping her strength; and when the battle ended, though the will was unfaltering, physical exhaustion triumphed, and delirium mercifully took the tortured spirit into her ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Mark Twain that his career had come to an end. Back in Hartford, sweating and suffering through sleepless nights, he wrote Howells ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to new creek. Revisit the pass. Hornets and diamond birds. More ornamented caves. Map study. Start for the mountain. A salt lake. A barrier. Brine ponds. Horses nearly lost. Exhausted horses. Follow the lake. A prospect wild and weird. Mount Olga. Sleepless animals. A day's rest. A National Gallery. Signal for natives. The lake again. High hill westward. Mount Unapproachable. McNicol's range. Heat increasing. Sufferings and dejection of the horses. Worrill's Pass. Glen Thirsty. Food all gone. Review of our situation. Horse staked. Pleasure of ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... all sickening!—sickening!" she exclaimed. She looked tired. Ghosts of sleepless nights circled her eyes. Suddenly she said, "Come in. Oh, do come in, Peter." She reached out and almost pulled him in. She was so urgent that Peter might have fancied Tump Pack at the gate with his automatic. He did glance around, but saw nobody passing except the Arkwright boy. ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... in his hair, and the tiny fretwork of wrinkles in his forehead and around his mouth. Then, whilst speaking, he grew frequently abstracted, and would start and murmur: "I beg pardon! I didn't quite catch what you were saying." Then I understood that he had sleepless nights as well as troublous days; and all the time I was powerless to help him, though I yearned to be able to do so. What was most aggravating was the complete silence of Father Duff and his contemporaries during these days of trial, and ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... notion of the woman, which now she was, came between him and the girl whom he had loved, whom he still loved with passion, and separated them. It was only on our voyage home, when we walked the deck together interminably during the hot, sleepless nights, that he first revealed to me without subterfuge, the slow agony by which this phantom slew him. And his old bitter conviction of the malignity of his luck, which had lain dormant in the first flush of his material prosperity, returned ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... but the long manner of it, the summed-up account of suffering, the interest paid on the capital of life after it was invested in death. God was to be pleased with items, and the sum of them. Item, a sleepless night. Item, a bad cold, caught by kneeling on the damp stones. Item, a dish of sweets refused on a feast-day. Item, the resolution not to laugh when a fly settled on the abbess's nose. Item, the resolution not ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... After a sleepless night, Gertrude arose from her couch, resolved that she would reveal the whole matter to her mother. Mrs. Miller was a woman of little or no feeling, proud, peevish, and passionate, thus making everybody miserable that came near her; and when she disliked any ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... listening a moment with a vain hope of overhearing some expression of pleasure, and lingering again on her way back, to be overtaken by her surprised lover, sought her own bed without rejoining the circle, and passed a sleepless and happy ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... of getting up a committee, or at least a public meeting in the cabin, to follow up the blow. By the aid of the latter, could he but persuade Mr. Effingham to take the chair, and Sir George Templemore to act as secretary, he thought he might escape a sleepless night, and, what was of quite as much importance, make a figure in ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... had seemed to remove every doubt of him from her mind, and she had said that she would marry him, and had been ecstatically happy while he kissed her and held her in his arms. And each time better knowledge of herself, a sleepless night, and the unsparing light of morning had filled her with shame and remorse, and made it quite clear that she had made one more mistake, and must tell him so, and eat humble pie. And exact a promise that he would never make love ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... no pocket-book. The discovery he made was far less welcome. An amethyst pin with sleeve-buttons to match, a piece of personal property that he highly valued, had disappeared from his dressing-case. There were three pairs of sleepless eyes in the doctor's quarters when the sentries were shouting the call of "Half-past twelve o'clock." Nellie Bayard, in her dainty little white room, was whispering over a tear-stained pillow her prayer for the safety of Randall McLean, who was riding post-haste ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... the end to a sleepless night, and lying in his bed drew some comfort from the sound of voices and the tread of feet in the passages and the rooms about him. These, at all events, were companionable, and they assured him of safety. But in a while they ceased, and he was left in a silence ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... the light. Then she, too, relaxed upon her pillow with a little sigh. Quiet fell on the little apartment. The street noises came up to her, now roaring, now growing faint. Emma McChesney lay there sleepless. She lay flat, hands clasped across her breast, her braids spread out on the pillow. In the darkness of the room the years rolled before her in panorama: her girlhood, her marriage, her unhappiness, Jock, the divorce, the struggle for work, those ten years on the road. Those ten years ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber
... stairs, and then paused, irresolute and unwilling to enter the Count's apartment. At last, summoning resolution, he was about to lift the latch, when it was raised, and Count Villabuena, completely dressed, and pale as if from a sleepless night, stood before him. He started on beholding Herrera, and his countenance was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... possible solution of the mystery. Several times in the course of the night I heard him prowling about the house. Finally, just after I had been called in the morning, he rushed into my room. He was in his dressing-gown, but his pale, hollow-eyed face told me that his night had been a sleepless one. ...
— The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax • Arthur Conan Doyle
... me to resent your attitude or contradict your calumnies. Miss Hamilton will see very little of me. An inflexible sense of duty will keep me away from the frivolous circle of society, sir. Alert an' sleepless——" ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... sleepless hours, in the melancholy, blear dawn of the November day, Katherine lying, face downwards, within the shelter of the embroidered curtains of the state bed, made her ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... was soon heard discreetly drawing bolts and turning out electric lights. Mathilde went straight up-stairs without even an attempt at drawing her mother into an evening gossip. She was aware of being tired after two nights rendered almost sleepless by her awareness of joy. She went to her room and shut the door. Her bed was piled high with extra covers, soft, light blankets and a down coverlet covered with pink silk. She took a certain hygienic pride in the extent to which she always ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... even while he kissed her good-bye. He had made a vigorous declaration of independence that night at dinner, and now he had gone away to let her think it over, not even noticing that her eyes were heavy from a sleepless night. ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... new fields of usefulness. The intervening months passed rapidly away, and I fear that I did not make much progress, yet I thought I should be able to pass the preliminary examination. That which was to follow worried me more and gave me many sleepless nights; but these would have been less in number, I fully believe, had it not been for one specification of my, outfit which the circular that accompanied my appointment demanded. This requirement was a pair of "Monroe shoes." Now, out in Ohio, what "Monroe shoes" were was a mystery—not ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... perils of robbers, in perils of mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils amongst false brethren.' Behold, my son! does not Heaven here seem to reveal the true type of knowledge—a sleepless activity, a pervading agency, a dauntless heroism, an all-supporting faith? A power—a power indeed—a power apart from the aggrandizement of self—a power that brings to him who owns and transmits it but 'weariness and painfulness; in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... day began to dawn, Dobbin, with long and weary yawn, Arose from this his sleepless night, But in low spirits and ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... with tenfold violence during the night. We were continually startled by the crashing of the falling trees around us, and who could tell but that the next would be upon us? Spite of our fatigue, we passed an almost sleepless night. When we arose in the morning, we were made fully alive to the perils by which we had been surrounded. At least fifty trees, the giants of the forest, lay prostrate ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... wood leading to the station. When quite screened from observation by the friendly leafage, Juliet turned quickly. She was pale and ill in looks, and there were dark circles under her eyes which told of sleepless nights. But she was dressed with her usual care and behaved ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... agree that you both look as bad as you can," said Betty crossly, for the strain of a sleepless night was beginning to tell. "It would be a relief to know ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope
... the night. The sound of feet Has died away from the empty street, And like an artisan, bending down His head on his anvil, the dark town Sleeps, with a slumber deep and sweet. Sleepless and restless, I alone, In the dusk and damp of these wails of stone, Wander and weep ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... into his weak body; to whom the joy of saving him from death would be so much greater than all fatigue, that there would be no shadow under her eyes, no pallor in her cheek, no weariness in her elastic gait to tell of sleepless nights spent by his bedside in soothing his ravings, or in listening for the beat of his heart when he lay still and exhausted, his tired head resting on her strong white arm. And when he seemed better and at ease she often fell asleep beside him, half sitting, half lying, ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... Meanwhile Corrus, after a sleepless night with his cattle, had driven them hurriedly back to the huts surrounding the "experimental station." Here the herdsman turned his herd over to another man, and then strode over among the huts. Outside ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... trembled when the post, which only came once a week, arrived. They spent sleepless nights, and it was especially at such times ...
— Skipper Worse • Alexander Lange Kielland
... far more obdurate than the Sultan—nothing under nine doti first-class cloths would redeem the donkeys. The business that day remained unsettled, and the night following was, as one may imagine, a very sleepless one to Hamed. As it turned out, however, the loss of the donkeys, the after heavy fine, and the sleepless night, proved to be blessings in disguise; for, towards midnight, a robber Mgogo visited his camp, and while attempting to steal a bale of cloth, was detected in the ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... tale should one day notice a ganger on the railway between Rotterdam and Dordrecht wearing the famous colours of a famous regiment round his neck you will understand how they got there. Then, wearied out with the fatigues of my sleepless night, I fell into a deep slumber, my verdant waterproof swathed round me, ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... falling asleep. Carew was out on picket; Captain Frazer, coat off and sleeves rolled to his shoulders, was busy among the wounded, and Weldon had cared to make few other close friends in the squadron. Around him, he could hear the murmurs of other sleepless ones; but he lay silent, his arms under his head, his face turned upward to the shining perspective of the stars. In similar perspective there ranged them-selves before his mind the events ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... God whose presence fills the sky; Whose sleepless eyes behold the worlds roll by; Whose faithful memory numbers, one by one, The sons of man, and calls them ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... Bear creeping round the pole, and in trying to feed the dying embers with damp fuel. And there it was that I discovered what I now make known to the world, namely, that gorse and holly will burn of themselves, even while they are yet rooted in the ground. So we sat sleepless and exhausted, and not without misgiving, for we had meant that night before camping to be right under the foot of the last cliffs, and we were yet many miles away. We were glad to see the river at last in the meadows show plainly under the growing light, the rocks turning red upon the sky-line, ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... Frederick uneasy. The first time he had seen Mara, she seemed to him the incarnation of childish purity and innocence. But since then, rumours had reached his ears which shook his faith in her chastity and caused him many agonised hours and sleepless nights. He had even had an excellent opinion of her father, and that, ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann |
