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# Weekend Words: Falling
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-falling/
- Published: 2012-12-30T15:00:56.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:35:54.000Z
- Description: With the country heading off the fiscal cliff, Weekend Words thinks about falling.
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 06:51 (2012, 2013, part 1)

![Peter Paul Rubens, "The Fall of Icarus" (1636). Oil on wood, 27 x 27 cm. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. (Image via the Web Gallery of Art)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2012/12/rubens-falling.jpg)

Peter Paul Rubens, “The Fall of Icarus” (1636). Oil on wood, 27 x 27 cm. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. (Image via the Web Gallery of Art)

*An exquisite corpse of apposite quotes from the Hyperallergic Weekend Editors.*

With the country heading off the fiscal cliff, Weekend Words thinks about falling.

> “My errors will point to thinking men the various roads, and will teach them the great art of treading on the brink of the precipice without falling into it.”  
>  
> **—Giacomo Casanova**

> “Falling short of perfection is a process that just never stops.”  
>  
> **—William Shawn**

> “Life is a horizontal fall.”  
>  
> **—Cocteau, *Opium* (1929)**

> “Turning and turning in the widening gyre  
> The falcon cannot hear the falconer;  
> Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;  
> Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,  
> The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  
> The ceremony of innocence is drowned;  
> The best lack all conviction, while the worst  
> Are full of passionate intensity.”  
>  
> **—William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming” (1919)**