Life & Wisdom Quote by Brian Sibley

The line opens with a disarming shrug: “Maybe it’s just my own…” That self-diagnosis isn’t just modesty; it’s a preemptive strike against the reader’s eye-roll. By naming “chronic morbidity and melancholia,” Sibley turns private gloom into a persona, a narrator we’re invited to trust because he’s already indicted himself. It’s a classic writerly tactic: confess the bias, then proceed as if that honesty buys you permission to go somewhere dark.

What makes the sentence work is its careful slide from the psychological to the statistical. He starts in the interior (“I really do think about it”), then widens the lens to a received cultural idea: “the small hours of the night” as death’s prime time. “It is said” is doing heavy lifting here. It’s a soft citation, a half-superstition, half-factoid that carries the hush of folklore. He doesn’t need to prove it; he needs the ambiance. The phrase gives the thought a communal backing while keeping the speaker insulated from pedantry.

The intent feels less like sensationalizing mortality than staging how it arrives: not as a grand epiphany, but as an intrusive recurrence, an insomnia companion. The subtext is that death isn’t only an event; it’s a mental habit, a recurring tab you can’t close when the world goes quiet. In a writer’s voice, the night becomes both setting and method: a time when the mind, unedited by daylight, drafts its most unforgiving copy.