- "Anyone whose goal is something higher," begins the narrator, "must expect someday to suffer vertigo" (2.17.1). Vertigo, he explains, is not the fear of falling, but rather the desire to fall.
- Tereza experiences this – a longing to "renounce her fate and soul," to "dismiss the crew of her soul from the deck of her body," to march naked around the pool singing with other women (2.17.2).