“Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.”
Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body, p 56
“Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.”
Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist
Robert Louis Stevenson book Virginibus Puerisque
Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 3.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Context: Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other's eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the experience of either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centrepoint of God's creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature.
Patrick Henry (1736–1799) attorney, planter, politician and Founding Father of the United States
Last public speech before his death (4 March 1799); as quoted in Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondences and Speeches (1891) by William Wirt Henry, Vol. 2, p. 609-610 http://www.archive.org/stream/pathenrylife02henrrich#page/608/mode/2up <br class="br">1790s, Speech (1799) <br class="br">Context: Let us trust God and our better judgment to set us right hereafter. United we stand, divided we fall. Let us not split into factions which must destroy that union upon which our existence hangs. Let us preserve our strength for the French, the English, the Germans, or whoever else shall dare invade our territory, and not exhaust it in civil commotions and intestine wars.
Alfred Bester book The Stars My Destination
Source: The Stars My Destination (1956), Chapter 12 (p. 188).