When I want to go to sleep, I must first get a whole menagerie of voices to shut up. You wouldn't believe what a racket they make in my room.

Kraus frames sleeplessness as a battle with an internal “menagerie” of voices—thoughts, remembered conversations, public rhetoric, and the nagging echoes of language itself. The image is comic (a noisy zoo in a bedroom) but also pointed: for a writer obsessed with the moral consequences of words, silence is hard-won because speech keeps reproducing itself inside the mind. The “racket” suggests not just private anxiety but the intrusive din of modern life—journalism, slogans, and social chatter—continuing after the day ends. The quote captures Kraus’s sense that language can become a tyranny, and that rest requires resisting its compulsive replay.