Ian Mcewan Quotes

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

You know I don't want to fall. I'm a tall woman, and it's a long way down.

It's a bit like the feeling I get when I'm standing on a cliff or high building, looking down at a suicidal drop. I start thinking about what would happen if I stepped off, the rush of the fall, the shattering collision, the quiet emptiness of death. Part of me wants to experience the thrill of complete surrender.

I don't have a fear of heights. I do, however, have a fear of falling from heights.

I really hate heights. I always like to live on the first floor.

When I did 'Bumble-ardy,' I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did 'Bumble-ardy'. I did 'Bumble-ardy' to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does.

Balconies scare me, and I would never do a shoot on one. I am afraid of heights.

I'm fine with being beat-up and pushed around, but I'm really scared of heights and scared of ledges.

I have been afraid all my life that I am going to die. All my life it has been stuffed in my imagination.

Life was so cheap in Vietnam. That is where my sense of urgency comes from.

The stunts on the ground I can do, but I've never been good with heights.

I don't even like walking up a ladder; I'm petrified of heights.

I'd see an old person on the street and start crying. I couldn't understand how people could cope, knowing they only had so long left. It would be like dominoes and then the last one fell and I'm a little heap on the floor. Doctors put me on anti-depressants for a couple of years.

Since I was shot, everything is such a dream to me. Like I don't know whether I'm alive or whether I died. I wasn't afraid before. And having been dead once, I shouldn't feel fear. But I am afraid. I don't understand why.

My family can tell you I'm not really a guy that likes roller coasters. I don't like going on Ferris wheels. I've got a six-feet rule; I like my feet no more than five, six feet from the ground at all times.

I used to be terrified of heights as a kid.

You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness ... has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I'm going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.

If I am killed, I can die by once; but to live in constant dread of it, is to die over and over again.

The Joker is a psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy. Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night. I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.

He who fears death dies every time he thinks of it.

I thought, I'm going to die. And, thinking that, I was determined to live.

I don't like heights. This is why I stopped growing at fifth grade.

We'd stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You'd think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn't.

And one of his partners asked Has he vertigo? and the other glanced out and down and said Oh no, only about ten feet more.

If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.