“Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.”
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Salman Rushdie 122
British Indian novelist and essayist 1947Related quotes

The Hollow Men (1925)
Variant: Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow.

Quoted in "Pacific Affairs: An International Review of Asia and the Pacific" - Page 1 - by University of British Columbia - Pan-Pacific relations.

Journal of John Quincy Adams (11 December 1838),
Context: The conflict between the principle of liberty and the fact of slavery is coming gradually to an issue. Slavery has now the power, and falls into convulsions at the approach of freedom. That the fall of slavery is predetermined in the counsels of Omnipotence I cannot doubt; it is a part of the great moral improvement in the condition of man, attested by all the records of history. But the conflict will be terrible, and the progress of improvement perhaps retrograde before its final progress to consummation.

Page 80
2000s, Promises to Keep (2008)

“Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall.”
Poem written in a glass window obvious to the Queen's eye, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). "Her Majesty, either espying or being shown it, did under-write, 'If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all'", Thomas Fuller, Worthies of England, vol. i. p. 419.

“Let's dance for fear your grace should fall
Let's dance for fear tonight is all”
Let's Dance
Song lyrics, Let's Dance (1983)