Comforting quotes to read before you go to bed (2024)

Whatever your experience of the pandemic, chances are your sleeping habits will have changed over the past year. With our work and social lives looking more different than ever before, even our dreams have reflected the strange circ*mstances of the outside world.

But wise words can help send us to the land of nod with greater ease. Here are some quotes from some of the literature’s sagest voices to help inspire a good night’s sleep:

"I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”
– from'Variation on the Word Sleep' byMargaret Atwood

"There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind”
– from The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3byC.S. Lewis

“Finish every day and be done with it.For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember. You have done what you could;some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. To-morrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day for all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the rotten yesterdays.”
–byRalph Waldo Emerson, in a letter to his daughter.

“There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.”
– from About A Boy by Nick Hornby.

"The best portion of a good man's life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love"
–byWilliam Wordsworth

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
– fromThe Bell Jar bySylvia Plath.

“There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.”
– from Their Eyes Were Watching GodbyZora Neale Hurston

"When you get into a tight place, and everything goes against you till it seems as if you couldn't hold on a minute longer,never give up then, for that's just the place and time that the tide'll turn."
– from Oldtown FolksbyHarriet Beecher Stowe.

"I am stronger than I am broken"
– from Hunger byRoxane Gay

Image: Alicia Fernandes/Penguin