Science Quote by Walter Reisch

Insomnia becomes a credo here, not a complaint. “I don’t sleep” lands like a badge of defiance, the kind of hard-edged self-description that dares you to call it unhealthy. Then the line swerves into metaphor: sleep as “little slices of death.” It’s vivid because it’s disproportionate. Everyone knows sleep is restorative; calling it death is an overreaction that exposes the speaker’s real subject, which isn’t biology but control.

For a scientist, that framing carries extra charge. Science is a profession built on measurement, replication, and the fantasy that uncertainty can be domesticated. Sleep is the daily reminder that the body doesn’t negotiate: consciousness must shut down, agency must be surrendered, time must pass without your supervision. Reisch’s phrase turns that surrender into something intolerable. The “slices” detail matters: death isn’t a single dramatic endpoint, it’s a recurring micro-withdrawal from the world, a routine rehearsal of absence. That’s why the line sticks. It taps the anxious modern feeling that life is a finite resource being quietly spent while you’re offline.

The subtext is ambition edged with dread. If sleep is death-in-miniature, then staying awake becomes a kind of protest against mortality and missed opportunity. It’s also a confession of fear: not just of dying, but of the blank interval where you can’t produce, observe, or think. The quote works because it dresses a familiar condition (restlessness) in a stark, almost theatrical image that reveals a worldview: existence is something you guard, minute by minute, against erasure.