“I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.”
Benjamin Franklin · widely attributed
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I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
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About this quote
Meaning
This quote captures a half-serious, half-comic relationship with sleep as a refuge from the chaos of waking life. The speaker is not simply expressing laziness; rather, the idea is that consciousness brings with it all the friction, failure, and disorder that sleep conveniently suspends. There is a quiet melancholy underneath the humor, the sense that the waking world is too much to manage and that unconsciousness offers a kind of merciful reset.
Context
The quote is widely attributed to Ernest Hemingway, though no verified written source has been pinned down with certainty. It circulates broadly on the internet and in popular collections, which is common with Hemingway, whose name is frequently attached to witty or rueful sayings he may or may not have actually written. Whether or not he coined these exact words, the sentiment fits a broader literary tradition of treating sleep as sanctuary, and it echoes the themes of exhaustion and disillusionment found throughout his work.
About the author
Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and short story writer whose spare, direct style became enormously influential in twentieth-century literature. His life included war correspondence, big-game hunting, deep-sea fishing, and years spent in several countries, experiences that fed directly into his fiction. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. His work often explored themes of endurance, loss, and the difficulty of finding meaning, which makes this wry little observation about preferring sleep feel genuinely at home in his sensibility.
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