The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping
Samantha Harvey
Top 10 Best Quotes
“To write fiction you have to engage in organised fraud, the laundering of experience into the offshore haven of words.”
“When I don't sleep, it's not that I feel tired so much as assaulted. In the morning after a night of no sleep my eyes are sore and tender and can barely open. My joints ache. There's a taste in my mouth which isn't like any other taste, only a feeling, and that feeling is defeat. My skull aches evenly across its hemisphere. [...] I go to bed at night, I get beaten up, come downstairs in the morning. Then I go about the day as if things were normal and I hadn't been beaten up, and everyone else treats me as if I hadn't been beaten up, and that way I survive, but no more than that. If somebody willed your destruction they could do it this way, by taking away your sleep. Of course, it's tried and tested”
“If the mind is a cacophony, the subconscious is silent theatre.”
“The night is itself without narrative – the way the hours move, less like a stream flowing somewhere and more like water swilling in a shallow pool, until suddenly the pool is drained and it’s morning.”
“Writing is lucid dreaming – the work of the subconscious that has a toe in the conscious, just enough to harness the dream’s waywardness. I always heard it said that writing draws on the subconscious, but that isn’t true. It is the subconscious, and it draws on the conscious.”
“Sleep. Sleep. Like money, you only think about it when you have too little. Then you think about it all the time, and the less you have the more you think about it. It becomes the prism through which you see the world and nothing can exist except in relation to it.”
“What an unlikely wonder is life, that it holds in itself the whole wildness of death – those bacteria didn’t come into life at the point of death, they were always there and they always wanted to eat you, and your cells always contained in them the enzymes that would assist your rotting. It was only ever your vehemence to survive that prevented all that. Did you know, were you ever able to detect within, the passionate warfare that kept you here?”
“The mind is a prison. And when we write the noise is distilled and alchemised, and the self can find a way out, which I think is what love is – the escape of the self from the self.”
“The Pirahã language and culture is not only literal but evidence-based. How do you know something happened? If the line of hearsay becomes too long, involving too many steps away from experience, the thing is no longer deemed to be of any importance to speak or think about.”
“Poetry can turn phrases that rotate the world, too small a rotation to cause a public commotion but enough to knock a solitary life a fraction off its axis, such that it will never be the same again.”
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Book Keywords:
biology, writing, mental-health, narrative, insomnia, subconscious, subsconscious, death, languages-and-culture, mental-illness, night, time, fiction, indigenous, mind, language
