Quotes about vertigo

A collection of quotes on the topic of vertigo, world, time, fall.

Quotes about vertigo

Pope Paul VI photo
Margaret Atwood photo
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Italo Calvino photo

“I felt a kind of vertigo, as if I were merely plunging from one world to another, and in each I arrived shortly after the end of the world had taken place.”

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels

Source: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Victor Hugo photo
Milan Kundera photo

“The steel worker on the girder
Learned not to look down, and does his work
And there are words we have learned
Not to look at,
Not to look for substance
Below them. But we are on the verge
Of vertigo.”

George Oppen (1908–1984) American poet

"The Building of the Skyscraper" st. 1, 1965; Collected Poems of George Oppen", New Directions, 1976, ISBN 0-811-20615-7

Salvador Dalí photo
Enoch Powell photo

“… when the empire dissolved… the people of Britain suffered from a kind of vertigo: they could not believe that they were standing upright, and reached out for something to clutch. It seemed axiomatic that economically, as well as politically, they must be part of something bigger, though the deduction was as unfounded as the premise. So some cried: 'Revive the Commonwealth'. And others cried: 'Let's go in with America into a North Atlantic Free Trade Area'. Yet others again cried: 'We have to go into Europe: there's no real alternative'. In a sense they were right: there is no alternative grouping. In a more important sense they were wrong: there is no need for joining anything. A Britain which is ready to exchange goods, services and capital as freely as it can with the rest of the world is neither isolated nor isolationist. It is not, in the sneering phrases of Chamberlain's day, 'Little England'… The Community is not a free trade area, which is what Britain, with a correct instinct, tried vainly to convert it into, or combine it into, in 1957-60. For long afterwards indeed many Britons continued to cherish the delusion that it really was a glorified free trade area and would turn out to be nothing more. On the contrary the Community is, what its name declares, a prospective economic unit. But an economic unit is not defined by economics – there are no natural economic units – it is defined by politics. What we call an economic unit is really a political unit viewed in its economic aspect: the unit is political.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Frankfurt (29 March 1971), from The Common Market: The Case Against (Elliot Right Way Books, 1971), pp. 76-77.
1970s

Milan Kundera photo

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo.”

pg 56
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body

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William Gibson photo
Michel Foucault photo
Yves Klein photo
Stephen Colbert photo

“Stephen: I spend so much time in the world that is spinning all the time, that to be in the no-spin zone actually gives me vertigo.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

The O'Reilly Factor, January 2007

Kim Novak photo