bed quotes

  • I don't know very much, but what I do know I know better than anybody, and I don't want to argue about it. I know what I think about an actor or an actress, and am not interested in what anybody else thinks. My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.

    -James Agate
      Journal entry, 9  Jun. Collected in Ego 6 (1944).

  • Por todos los senderos de la noche han venido a llorar en mi lecho. ‚Fueron tantos, son tantos! Yo no se   cua  les viven, yo no se   cua  l ha muerto. Me llorare   a m | misma para llorarlos todos. They have come from all of night's pathways to cry in my bed. They were so many, they are so many! I don't know who lives, I don't know who has died. I'll cry for myself so that I can cry for all.

    - Delmira Agustini
      El rosario de Eros,'Mis amores' ('My lovers').

  • Once in royal David's city Stood a lowly cattle-shed, Where a mother laid her baby In a manger for his bed. Mary was that mother mild, Jesus Christ her little child.

    - Cecil Frances Alexander
      'Once in Royal David's City'.

  • Westron winde, when wilt thou blow, The smalle raine downe can raine? Christ if my love were in my armes, And I in my bed againe.

    -Anonymous
    c.1500  Untitled lyric.

  • Creep into thy narrow bed, Creep, and let no more be said! Vain thy onset! all stands fast. Thou thyself must break at last. Let the long contention cease! Geese are swans, and swans are geese. Let them have it how they will! Thou art tired; best be still.

    - Matthew Arnold
      New Poems,'The Last  Word'.

  • 'Oh, mother, mother, mak my bed, And mak it saft and narrow; My love has died for me to-day, I'll die for him tomorrow.'

    -Ballads
    'Barbara  Allen'.

  • 'A bed, a bed,'Clerk Sanders said, 'A bed for you and me!' 'Fye na, fye na,'said may Margaret, 'Till anes we married be!'

    -Ballads
    'Clerk Sanders'

  • Is there any room at your head, Sanders? Is there any room at your feet? Or any room at your twa sides, Where fain, fain I would sleep? There is nae room at my head, Margaret, There is nae room at my feet; My bed it is the cold, cold grave; Among the hungry worms I sleep.

    -Ballads
    'Clerk Sanders'.

  •    My only solution for the problem of habitual accidents†is to stay in bed all day. Even then, there is always the chance that you will fall out.

    - Robert Charles Benchley
      Chips Off the Old Benchley,'Safety Second'.

  •    Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If Isay, Surely the darknessshall cover me; even thenight shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    Psalms139:7^12.

  • Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    St  John 5:8.

  • Best bloody place is bloody bed, With bloody ice on bloody head, You might as well be bloody dead, In bloody Orkney.

    - Hamish pseudonym of  Andrew James Fraser Blair Blair
      'The Bloody Orkneys', last stanza. First published in Arnold Silcock Verse and Worse,'Queer People'.

  • O rose, thou art sick! The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.

    -William Blake
      Songs of Experience,'The Sick Rose'.

  •    When Harriet goes to bed with a man, she always takes her wet blanket with her.

    - Anatole Broyard
      On a character in Iris Owen's  After Claude (1973).  Aroused by Books.

  • Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled, Scots, wham Bruce has aften led, Welcome to your gory bed, Or to victorie! Now's the day, and now's the hour; See the front o' battle lour; See approach proud Edward's power, Chains and Slaverie!

    - Robert Burns
      'Bruce's  Address at Bannockburn', stanza1.

  •    A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.

    -JohnWilliam Cheever
      Collected in The Journals,'The Sixties'.

  • Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

    - G(ilbert) K(eith) Chesterton
      'On Lying In Bed'.

  • The ideal companion in bed is a good book.

    - Robertson Davies
    Interviewed by Terence M Green, recorded in  J Madison Davis (ed) Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989).

  • I have no humour to marry; I love to lie o' both sides of the bed myself; and again, o'th'other side.

    -Thomas Dekker
    The Roaring Girl (with Thomas Middleton), act 2, sc.2.

  • Ample make this Bed Make this Bed with Awe In it wait till Judgement break Excellent and Fair.

    - Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
    c.1864  Complete Poems, no.829 (first published1891).

  • Come, madam, come, all rest my powers defy, Until I labour, I in labour lie. The foe oft-times having the foe in sight, Is tired with standing though he never fight. Off with that girdle, like heaven's zone glistering, But a far fairer world encompassing. Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear, That busy fools may be stopped there. Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime Tells me from you that now 'tis your bed time.

    -John Donne
    c.1595  Elegies, no.19,'To His Mistress Going to Bed'.

  • Where, like a pillow on a bed, A pregnant bank swelled up, to rest The violet's reclining head, Sat we two, one another's best.

    -John Donne
    c.1595^1605  'The Ecstasy', collected in Songs and Sonnets (1633).

  • And he that will go to bed sober, Falls with the leaf still in October.

    - Dario Fo
      The Bloody Brother, act 2, sc.2, song (with Ben  Jonson, George Chapman and Philip Massinger).

  • The members of our secret service have apparently spent so much time looking under the bed for Communists that they haven't had time to look in the bed.

    - Michael Mackintosh Foot
       Attributed comment on the Profumo scandal.

  • Poetryisnotanexpressionofthepartyline.It'sthattimeof night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

    - Allen Ginsberg
    Quoted in Barry Miles Ginsberg (1989), ch.5.

  • Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap, Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep. The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn, The swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built shed, The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

    -Thomas Gray
    Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, l.13^20.

  • I am happy now that Charles calls on my bedchamber less frequently than of old. As it is, I now endure but two calls a week and when I hear his steps outside my door I lie down on my bed, close my eyes, open my legs, and think of England.

    - Lady Hillingdon
       Journal entry. Quoted in  J Gathorne-Hardy  The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny (1972), ch.3. The phrase is often rendered 'Lie back and think of England'.

  • Lady Capricorn, he understood, was still keeping open bed.

    - Aldous Leonard Huxley
      Antic Hay, ch.21.

  • 'Bed,'as the Italian proverb succinctly puts it,'isthe poor man's opera.'

    - Aldous Leonard Huxley
      Heaven and Hell.

  • A man of your head and hair should owe more to that reverend ceremony, and not mountthemarriage bed like atown-bull, ora mountain-goat; but stay the dueseason and ascend it then with religion and fear.

    - Ben Jonson
    ^10  Epicoene, act 3, sc.5.

  • Thee gentle Spenser fondly led; But me he mostly sent to bed.

    -Walter Savage Landor
      'To Wordsworth:  Those Who Have Laid the Harp  Aside'.

  • The dark was talking to the dead; The lamp was dark beside my bed.

    - (Frederick) Louis MacNeice
    Plant and Phantom,'Autobiography', l.13^14.

  • Death devours all lovely things; Lesbia with her sparrow Shares the darknesspresently Every bed is narrow.

    - Edna St Vincent Millay
    Second  April,'Passer Mortuus Est'.

  • The King said 'Butter, eh?' And bounced out of bed.

    - A(lan) A(lexander) Milne
      When We Were VeryYoung,'The King's Breakfast'.

  • The Chairmanlooked dissatisfied lying onhis death bed.

    - Anchee Min
      Of Mao Zedong. Red  Azalea.

  • Hardlyany of the women, who are a full half of the population, work; or if they do, then as a rule their husbands lie snoring in bed.

    - SirThomas More
      Utopia (English translation1556), bk.2.

  • Lincoln's bedroom! And you see that great bed, it looks like a cathedral.

    -Jacqueline Lee Kennedy ne  e Bouvier Onassis
      On her first night in the White House, in Newsweek,1  Jan.

  • And so to bed.

    - Samuel Pepys
      Diary entry, 20 Apr and passim.

  • For the past 40 years I had never folded my own quilt, made my own bed, or poured out my own

    -PuYi

  • The genius of American culture and its integrity comes from fidelity to the light. Plain as day, we say. Happy as the day is long. Early to bed, early to rise. American virtues are daylight virtues: honesty, integrity, plain speech.We say yes when we mean yes and no when we mean no, and all else comes from the evil one. America presumes innocence and even the right to happiness.

    - Richard Rodriguez
      Frontiers,'Night and Day'.

  • In Israel it's enough to liveyou don't have to do anything else and you go to bed exhausted. Have you ever noticed that Jews shout? Even one ear is more than you need.

    - Philip Milton Roth
      The Counterlife, ch.2.

  • I always claim the mission workers came out too early to catch any sinners on this part of Broadway. At such an hour the sinners are still in bed resting up from their sinning of thenight before, so they will be ingood shape for more sinning a little later on.

    - (Alfred) Damon Runyon
      Runyon a'   la Carte,'The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown'.

  • And when war is done and youth stone dead I'd toddle safely home and diein bed.

    - Siegfried Louvain Sassoon
      'Base Details'.

  • As I grow older and older, And totter towards the tomb, I find that I care less and less Who goes to bed with whom.

    - Dorothy L(eigh) Sayers
    'That'sWhy I Never Read Modern Novels', collected in Janet Hitchman Such a Strange Lady (1975), ch.12.

  • No repose for Sir Walter but in the grave. Friends, don't let me expose myselfget me to bedthat's the only place.

    - Sir Walter Scott
      Quoted inJohn G Lockhart Memoirs of the Life of SirWalter Scott, Bart. (1837^8). Scott had fallen asleep in his bath-chair while trying to write a few words.

  • Whatever may have been my enthusiasm or impatience to be up and doing on the night before, the hour for getting up always finds me with no other ambition in the world than to be permitted to lie where I am and sleep, sleep, sleep.Not soTilman.Ihave never met anyonewith such a complete disregard for the sublime comforts of the early morning bed. However monstrously early we might decide, thenight before, toget up, hewas about at least half an hour before the time. He was generally very good about it, and used to sit placidly smoking his pipe over the fire.

    - Eric Earle Shipton
      On climbing with H W (Bill) Tilman. Nanda Devi.

  • I'm lying in bed counting sheep when all of a sudden it hits me†a character like Samson, Hercules and all the strong men I heard tell of rolled into one.Only more so.

    -Jerome Siegel
    Recalling the inspiration behind Superman, created1938. Quoted in Time,14 Mar1988.

  •    More dreams are destroyed in bed than are ever found there.

    - Robin Skelton
    A Devious Dictionary.

  • So passeth, in the passing of a day, Of mortal life the leaf, the bud, the flower, No more doth flourish after first decay, That erst was sought to deck both bed and bower, Of manya lady, and many a paramour: Gather therefore the rose, whilst yet is prime, For soon comes age, that will her pride deflower: Gather the rose of love, whilst yet is time, Whilst loving thou mayst love'  d be with equal crime.

    - Edmund Spenser
      The Faerie Queen, bk.2, canto12, stanza 75.

  • A busy manwho can keep up a daily journal resembles a Steel person preparing for bed with the shades up† When such a man publishes parts of his journal, the reader must conclude he always knew the lights were on.

    - Roger Starr
      On George F Kennan Sketches From a Life (1989). In the Washington Post, 8 May.

  • 'There is no terror, brotherToby, in its looks, but what it borrowsfromgroans and convulsionsand theblowing of noses, and the wiping away of tears with the bottoms ofcurtains, ina dying man'sroomStrip itofthese, what is it?''Tis better in battle than in bed,'said my uncle Toby.

    - Laurence Sterne
    ^67  Of death.Tristram Shandy, bk.5, ch.3.

  • My brotherToby, quothshe, isgoing tobe married to Mrs 818 Wadman. Then he will never, quoth my father, lie diagonally in his bed again as long as he lives.

    - Laurence Sterne
    ^67  Tristram Shandy, bk.6, ch.39.

  • Marriage is like life in thisthat it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

    - Robert Louis Stevenson
    Virginibus Puerisque,'Virginibus Puerisque', pt.1.

  •   In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candle-light. In summer, quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day. I have to go to bed and see The birds still hopping on the tree, Or hear the grown-up people's feet Still going past me in the street.

    - Robert Louis Stevenson
      A Child's Garden ofVerses, no.1,'Bed in Summer', stanzas1^2.

  • Must we to bed indeed? Well then, Let us arise and go like men, And face with an undaunted tread The long black passage up to bed.

    - Robert Louis Stevenson
      A Child's Garden ofVerses, XLI,'North-West Passage', pt.1, 'Good Night', stanza 3.

  • Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, has flown, Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone; Maud And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, And the musk of the rose is blown. For a breeze of morning moves, And the planet of Love is on high, Beginning to faint in the light that she loves On a bed of daffodil sky.

    -Tennyson
      Maud, pt.1, sect.22, stanza1, l.850^9.

  • I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Colombus,Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father.

    -James Grover Thurber
      My Life and HardTimes, ch.1.

  • Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthyand wealthyand dead.

    -James Grover Thurber
      'The Shrike and the Chipmunks', in the NewYorker,18 Feb.

  • 'Now,'she said,'spit-spot into bed.'

    - P(amela) L(yndon) Travers
      Mary Poppins, ch.1.

  • Lying inbed,Iabandonedthefacts againand was back in Ambrosia.

    - Keith Spencer Waterhouse
      Billy Liar, opening sentence.

  • I haven't been to sleep for over a year. That's why I go to bed early.One needs more rest if one doesn't sleep.

    - Evelyn Arthur StJohn Waugh
      Decline and Fall, pt.2, ch.3.

  • A rather bitter Britishmusicianonceremarked sourly toa friend of mine: 'Oh, all she knows about music she learned in bed with musicians.' To that, I can only add, what better place to learn?

    -Val(erie) Wilmer
      Mama SaidThere'd Be Days LikeThis, ch.3.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Learn more about bed

link/cite print suggestion box