“Most important thing in life is learning how to fall.”

“I’ll fall.”You wont fall.”I’ll fall. I’ll fall and I’ll die.’As I said it, I could see it happening. The foot stepping on air, pulling the rest of my body with it, tree limbs breaking as I plummeted down. ‘No,’ he said, his voice assured, ‘You’d never do that to me.”

“He danced with the sky instead, and the sky dropped him like a rotten plum.”

“One doesn’t fall into love… one digs a hole for himself to trip… claiming he didn’t see it coming”

“My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that’s it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I’d loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.”

“In my dream I know I am falling. But there is no up or down, no walls or sides or ceilings, just the sensation of cold and darkness everywhere. I am so scared I could scream. But when I open my mouth, nothing happens. And I wonder if you fall forever and never touch down, is it really still falling? I think I will fall forever.”

“Falling apart is great—it’s the only chance you get to put yourself back together however you want.”

“But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem:they might point to the catkins hangingfrom the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the raindescending on black earth in early spring. —And we, who always think of happinessrising, would feel the emotionthat almost baffles uswhen a happy thing falls.”

“God’s relationship with man does not work in a way in which man stumbles and then God has to drop what he is doing in order to lift him up; rather, man stumbles so that God can lift him up. Hence it is utterly impossible to truly diminish his glory.”

“The splendid thingabout falling apartsilently…is thatyou can start overas many timesas you like.”

“The harder you fall, the heavier your heart; the heavier your heart, the stronger you climb; the stronger you climb, the higher your pedestal.”

“Falling in love is like getting hit by a truck and yet not being mortally wounded. just sick to your stomach, high one minute, low the next. Starving hungry but unable to eat. hot, cold, forever horny, full of hope and enthusiasm, with momentary depressions that wipe you out.It is also not being able to remove the smile from your face, loving life with a mad passionate intensity, and feeling ten years younger.Love does not appear with any warning signs. You fall into it as if pushed from a high diving board. No time to think about what’s happening. It’s inevitable. An event you can’t control. A crazy, heart-stopping, roller-coaster ride that just has to take its course.”

“You can’t become a decent horseman until you fall off and get up again, a good number of times. There’s life in a nutshell.”

“Sometimes it takes a good fall to really know where you stand”