Stair Quotes

That's the girl, as Grandma Win would say. Put one foot on the first stair, then the other one beside it, like when you were three. You need to take care of yourself, because who else will? There. ~ Margaret Atwood

I wonder if when birds are new they ever try to land on clouds? And if so is it like when you think you've gone down the last stair but there's still another one and you step off and make that weird "oof" noise and everyone looks at you? That would suck. But at least birds are hidden when they fuck up and fall through clouds. ~ Jenny Lawson

Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading? ~ Ayn Rand

Watching him lumber back toward the apartment building, I got so mad I did something I can't explain. As Gabe reached the doorway, I made the hand gesture I'd seen Grover make on the bus, a sort of warding-off-evil gesture, a clawed hand over my heart, then a shoving movement toward Gabe. The screen door slammed shut so hard it whacked him in the butt and sent him flying up the stair case as if he'd been shot from a cannon.
Maybe it was just the wind, or some freak accident with the hinges, but I didn't stay long enough to find out.
I got in the Camaro and told my mom to step on it. ~ Rick Riordan

All rising to great places is by a winding stair. ~ Gautama Buddha

I will not exorcise you - I'd miss your fragrance, the soft tread of your step on the stair ~ John Geddes

Across the sea and up the stair
The Wild Poppy's everywhere.
Though southmen search until they're blind
They know not what they seek to find. ~ Diana Peterfreund

A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood. ~ Franz Kafka

In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak. ~ Tom Robbins

Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground covered we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward. ~ William Butler Yeats

I sat at a lunch table with a professor of premonotheistic spirituality, plus several women from some of the tribes in this state that has more Native Americans than any other. All agreed that the paradigm of human organization had been the circle, not the pyramid or hierarchy - and it could be again.

I'd never known there was a paradigm that linked instead of ranked. It was as if I'd been assuming opposition - and suddenly found myself in a welcoming world; like putting one's foot down for a steep stair and discovering level ground.

Still, when a Laguna law student from New Mexico complained that her courses didn't cite the Iroquois Confederacy as the model for the U.S. Constitution - or explain that this still existing Confederacy was the oldest continuing democracy in the world - I thought she was being romantic. But I read about the Constitutional Convention and discovered that Benjamin Franklin had indeed cited the Iroquois Confederacy as a model. He was well aware of its success in unifying vast areas of the United States and Canada by bringing together Native nations for mutual decisions but also allowing autonomy in local ones. He hoped the Constitution could do the same for the thirteen states. That's why he invited two Iroquois men to Philadelphia as advisers. Among their first questions was said to be: Where are the women? ~ Gloria Steinem

Upon a darkened night the flame of love was burning in my breastAnd by a lantern bright I fled my house while all in quiet rest.Shrouded by the night and by the secret stair I quickly fled.The veil concealed my eyes while all within lay quiet as the dead ~ John Of The Cross

It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things. ~ Lemony Snicket

Only In Sleep
Only in sleep I see their faces,
Children I played with when I was a child,
Louise comes back with her brown hair braided,
Annie with ringlets warm and wild.
Only in sleep Time is forgotten
What may have come to them, who can know?
Yet we played last night as long ago,
And the doll-house stood at the turn of the stair.
The years had not sharpened their smooth round faces,
I met their eyes and found them mild
Do they, too, dream of me, I wonder,
And for them am I too a child? ~ Sara Teasdale

He grimaced. 'Jesus, for a girl who made tea for a living you make a terrible cup.'

'You're just used to lesbian tea,' I said. 'All that lapsang souchong herbal stuff.'

'Lesbian tea!' He almost choked. 'Well, it's better than this stair varnish. Christ. You could stand a spoon up in that. ~ Jojo Moyes

Did you tell my mother that you called me a bitch last night,too?" I asked him. "Because that's the best way I know to win parents over."
For a split second,he looked uncomfortable. Almost immediately, he recovered and went back on the offensive. "You shouldn't wear those jeans.People might think something."
I stomped my foot on the stair. "Like what? I want to show off my fire-crotch? What do you care? God! Stop following me." My hair was down now, and I felt it smack into his chest as I whirled around and flounced down the rest of the stairs, across the lobby, and into the cold night. ~ Jennifer Echols

Linger now with me, thou Beauty,
On the sharp archaic shore.
Surely 'tis a wastrel's duty
And the gods could ask no more.
If thou lingerest when I linger,
If thou tread'st the stones I tread,
Thou wilt stay my spirit's hunger
And dispel the dreams I dread.

Come thou, love, my own, my only,
Through the battlements of Groan;
Lingering becomes so lonely
When one lingers on one's own.

I have lingered in the cloisters
Of the Northern Wing at night,
As the sky unclasped its oysters
On the midnight pearls of light;
For the long remorseless shadows
Chilled me with exquisite fear.
I have lingered in cold meadows
Through a month of rain, my dear.

Come, my Love, my sweet, my Only,
Through the parapets of Groan.
Lingering can be very lonely
When one lingers on one's own.

In dark alcoves I have lingered
Conscious of dead dynasties;
I have lingered in blue cellars
And in hollow trunks of trees.
Many a traveler through moonlight
Passing by a winding stair
Or a cold and crumbling archway
Has been shocked to see me there.

I have longed for thee, my Only,
Hark! the footsteps of the Groan!
Lingering is so very lonely
When one lingers all alone.

Will thou come with me, and linger?
And discourse with me of those
Secret things the mystic ~ Mervyn Peake

For one day as I leant over a gate that led into a field, the rhythm stopped: the rhymes and the hummings, the nonsense and the poetry. A space was cleared in my mind. I saw through the thick leaves of habit. Leaning over the gate I regretted so much litter, so much unaccomplishment and separation, for one cannot cross London to see a friend, life being so full of engagements; nor take a ship to India and see a naked man spearing a fish in blue water. I said life had been imperfect, an unfinished phrase. It had been impossible for me, taking snuff as I do from any bagman met in a train, to keep coherency - that sense of the generations, of women carrying red pitchers to the Nile, of the nightingale who sings among conquests and migrations. It had been too vast an undertaking, I said, and how can I go on lifting my foot perpetually to climb the stair? I addressed myself as one would speak to a companion with whom one is voyaging to the North Pole. ~ Virginia Woolf

:The way to the Seaglass Stair will be long and arduous. There will be those who wish to stop you. They will kill you to keep you from succeeding.:
:Why? That's insane.:
:As if insanity were some fabrication, some dark tale Hemfra told you one night when you were a child and refused to sleep. There will always be resistance to anything and everything, defying all logic, all natural sense of self-preservation. There will be those who wish for you to simply let the world fade away. It is the way of humans to be illogical for the sake of personal conviction and made up nonsense.: ~ Ash Gray

All rising to great place is by a winding stair. - Sir Francis Bacon, ~ Clive Barker

It's like those nights when I was a kid, lying awake thinking the darkness would go on forever. And I couldn't go back to sleep because of the dream of the whatever it was in the cellar coming out of the corner. I'd lie in the hot, rumpled bed, hot burning hot, trying to shut myself away and know that there were three eternities before the dawn. Everything was the night world, the other world where everything but good could happen, the world of ghosts and robbers and horrors, of things harmless in the daytime coming to life, the wardrobe, the picture in the book, the story, coffins, corpses, vampires, and always squeezing, tormenting darkness, smoke thick. And I'd think of anything because if I didn't go on thinking I'd remember whatever it was in the cellar down there, and my mind would go walking away from my body and go down three stories defenceless, down the dark stair past the tall, haunted clock, through the whining door, down the terrible steps to where the coffin ends were crushed in the walls of the cellar – and I'd be held helpless on the stone floor, trying to run back, run away, climb up---- ~ William Golding

Oh, if I had had a friend at this moment, a friend in an attic room, dreaming by candlelight and with a violin lying ready at his hand! How I should have slipped up to him in his quiet hour, noiselessly climbing the winding stair to take him by surprise, and then with talk and music we should have held heavenly festival throughout the night! ~ Hermann Hesse

The other day upon the stair, I saw a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today; how I wish he'd go away!"

~Gabrielle O'Callaghan towards Adam Black ~ Karen Marie Moning

Later, William Stoner could not remember how he learned these things, that first afternoon and early evening at Josiah Claremont's house; for the time of his meeting was blurred and formal, like the figured tapestry on the stair wall off the foyer. ~ John Williams

The writer of this legend then records
Its ghostly application in these words:
The image is the Adversary old,
Whose beckoning finger points to realms of gold;
Our lusts and passions are the downward stair
That leads the soul from a diviner air;
The archer, Death; the flaming jewel, Life;
Terrestrial goods, the goblet and the knife;
The knights and ladies all whose flesh and bone
By avarice have been hardened into stone;
The clerk, the scholar whom the love of pelf
Tempts from his books and from his nobler self.
The scholar and the world! The endless strife,
The discord in the harmonies of life!
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books;
The market-place, the eager love of gain,
Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain! ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I read a page of Plato's great work. I can no longer understand anything, because behind the words on the page, which have their own heavenly brightness, to be sure, there shines an even brighter, an enormous, dazzling -why- that blots out everything, cancels out, destroys all meaning. All individual intelligence. When one has understood, one stops, satisfied with what one has understood. I do not understand. Understanding is far too little. To have understood is to be fixed, immobilized. It is as though one wanted to stop on one step in the middle of a staircase, or with one foot in the void and the other on the endless stair. But a mere why, a new why can set one off again, can unpetrify what was petrified and everything starts flowing afresh. How can one understand? One cannot. ~ Eugene Ionesco

Starting with a Statement
•What a beautiful day.What's your favorite season of the year?
•I was truly touched by that movie.How did you like it? Why?
•This is a wonderful restaurant.What is your favorite restaurant? Why?
•What a great conference! Tell me about the sessions you attended.
•I was absent last week.What did I miss?
•That was an interesting program after lunch.What did you think?
•Presidential campaigns seem to start immediately after the inauguration.What do you think of the campaign process?
•I am so frustrated with getting this business off the ground.Do you have any ideas?
•I am excited about our new mayor.How do you think her administration will be different from her predecessor's?
•Your lawn always looks so green.What is your secret?
•We've been working together for months now.I'd like to get to know you better.Tell me about some of your outside interests.
•You worked pretty hard on that stair stepper.What other equipment do you use?
•You always wear such attractive clothes.What are your favorite stores?
•What a beautiful home.How do you manage to run a house with four children?
•I read in the newspaper that our governor has taken another trip overseas.What do you think of all his travel? ~ Debra Fine

Stairs are your teacher; they teach you to be stronger. Love your teacher and every time life puts some stairs before you, accept them as a present! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Of all tools, an observatory is the most sublime ... What is so good in a college as an observatory? The sublime attaches to the door and to the first stair you ascent, that this is the road to the stars. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have walked a stair of swords, I have worn a coat of scars. I have vowed with hollow words, I have lied my way to the stars -Songs of Sapphique ~ Catherine Fisher

An old farm is always more than the people under its roof. It is the past as well as the present, and vanished generations have built themselves into it as well as left their footsteps in the worn woodwork of the stair. ~ Henry Beston

The first stair to failure is ignorance. Keep learning by leaning on the lap of information and you'll take the lead! ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Where I'm is one of those stair climbing machines the agent has installed. You climb and climb forever and never get off the ground. You're trapped in your hotel room. It's the mystical sweat love lodge experience of our time, the only sort of Indian vision quest we can schedule into our daily planner.Our Stair Master to Heaven. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

A stair will be precious for you if only you climb up it! For a thing to be precious for you, you must live it! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Now let us go, love, down the winding stair,
With fingers intertwined ... ~ William Morris

Romance Of A Youngest Daughter"

Who will wed the Dowager's youngest daughter,
The Captain? filled with ale?
He moored his expected boat to a stake in the water
And stumbled on sea-legs into the Hall for mating,
Only to be seduced by her lady-in-waiting,
Round-bosomed, and not so pale.


Or the thrifty burgher in boots and fancy vest
With considered views of marriage?
By the tidy scullery maid he was impressed
Who kept that house from depreciation and dirt,
But wife does double duty and takes no hurt,
So he rode her home in his carriage.


Never the spare young scholar antiquary
Who was their next resort;
They let him wait in the crypt of the Old Library
And found him compromised with a Saxon book,
Claiming his truelove Learning kept that nook
And promised sweet disport.


Desirée (of a mother's christening) never shall wed
Though fairest child of her womb;
"We will have revenge," her injured Ladyship said,
"Henceforth the tightest nunnery be thy bed
By the topmost stair! When the ill-bred lovers come
We'll say, She is not at home. ~ John Crowe Ransom

While the moon smoothly shifted the shadows from one side of Edgewood to the other, Daily Alice dreamed that she stood in a flower-starred field where on a hill there grew an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace, their branches intertwined like fingers. Far down the hall, Sophie dreamed that there was a tiny door in her elbow, open a crack, through which the wind blew, blowing on her heart. Dr. Drinkwater dreamed he sat before his typewriter and wrote this: 'There is an aged, aged insect who lives in a hole in the ground. One June he puts on his summer straw, and takes his pipe and his staff and his lamp in half his hands, and follows the worm and the root to the stair that leads up to the door into blue summer.' This seemed immensely significant to him, but when he awoke he wouldn't be able to remember a word of it, try as he might. Mother beside him dreamed her husband wasn't in his study at all, but with her in the kitchen, where she drew tin cookie-sheets endlessly out of the oven; the baked things on them were brown and round, and when he asked her what they were, she said 'Years'. ~ John Crowley

The remaining chain swung down, he wrenched the door out and he was free. The last thing he heard behind him was the oncoming stomp of running feet.

Now began flight, that excruciating accompaniment to both the sleep-dream and the drug-dream as well. Down endless flights of stairs that seemed to have increased decimally since he had come up them so many days before. Four, fourteen, forty - there seemed no end to them, no bottom. Round and round he went, hand slapping at the worn guard-rail only at the turns to keep from bulleting head-on into the wall each time. The clamor had come out onto a landing high above him now, endless miles above him; a thin voice came shouting down the stair-well, "There he is! See him down there?" raising the hue and cry to the rest of the pack. Footsteps started cannonading down after him, like avenging thunder from on high. They only added wings to his effortless, almost cascading waterlike flight.

Like a drunk, he was incapable of hurting himself. At one turning he went off his feet and rippled down the whole succeeding flight of stair-ribs like a wriggling snake. Then he got up again and plunged ahead, without consciousness of pain or smart. The whole staircase-structure seemed to hitch crazily from side to side with the velocity of his descent, but it was really he that was hitching. But behind him the oncoming thunder kept gaining.

Then suddenly, after they'd kept on for hours, the stairs suddenly ended, he'd ~ Cornell Woolrich

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair -
Lean on a garden urn -
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair -
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise -
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon's repose. ~ T.S. Eliot

He's outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)
And his footprints are not found in any file of Scotland Yard's.
And when the larder's looted, or the jewel-case is rifled,
Or when the milk is missing, or another Peke's been stifled,
Or the greenhouse glass is broken, and the trellis past repair -
Ay, there's the wonder of the thing! Macavity's not there!

And when the Foreign Office find a Treaty's gone astray,
Or the Admiralty lose some plans and drawings by the way,
There may be a scrap of paper in the hall or on the stair -
But it's useless to investigate - Mcavity's not there!
And when the loss has been disclosed, the Secret Service say:
'It must have been Macavity!' - but he's a mile away.
You'll be sure to find him resting, or a-licking of his thumbs,
Or engaged in doing complicated long-division sums.

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.
He always has an alibi, and one or two to spaer:
At whatever time the deed took place - MACAVITY WASN'T THERE!
And they say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known
(I might mention Mungojerrie, I might mention Griddlebone)
Are nothing more than agents for the Cat who all the time
Just controls their operations: the Napoleon of Crime! ~ T.S. Eliot

Always more, always hungrily scratching for more. But there were times, quiet moments, when our mother was sleeping, when she hadn't slept in two days, and any noise, any stair creak, any shut door, any stifled laugh, any voice at all, might wake her, those still, crystal mornings, when we wanted to protect her, this confused goose of a woman, this stumbler, this gusher, with her backaches and headaches and her tired, tired ways, this uprooted Brooklyn creature, this tough talker, always with tears when she told us she loved us, her mixed-up love, her needy love, her warmth, those mornings when sunlight found the cracks in our blinds and laid itself down in crisp strips on our carpet, those quiet mornings when we'd fix ourselves oatmeal and sprawl onto our stomachs with crayons and paper, with glass marbles that we were careful not to rattle, when our mother was sleeping, when the air did not smell like sweat or breath or mold, when the air was still and light, those mornings when silence was our secret game and our gift and our sole accomplishment - we wanted less: less weight, less work, less noise, less father, less muscles and skin and hair. We wanted nothing, just this, just this. ~ Justin Torres

As she descended below the floor level of the loft, her former partner in juvenile crime was revealed to her from scuffed paniolo boots, up a long, muscled body that appeared to go on forever, to a venerable black Stetson. His cowboy look was new to her and it suited him. When she backtracked to his Hawaiian-sky blue eyes, she swayed under the impact and abruptly sat down. Any stair step would do." Noelani Beecham, Pele's Tears ~ Sharon K. Garner

Men at Forty"

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices trying
His father's tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses. ~ Donald Justice

Elvis has left the building to climb up that heavenly stair. So what if he looks like a wart-hog in heat? ~ Frank Zappa

Do you like to slide?" His voice was eager.
Stair rails! Did he suspect me? I forced a sigh. "No, Majesty. I'm terrified of heights."
"Oh." His polite tone had returned.
"I wish I could enjoy it. This fear of heights is an affliction."
He nodded, a show of sympathy but not much interest. I was losing him.
"Especially," I added, "as I've grown taller. ~ Gail Carson Levine

At the stair-foot Hephaistion was waiting. He happened to be there, as he happened to have a ball handy if Alexander wanted a game, or water if he was thirsty; not by calculation, but in a constant awareness by which no smallest trifle was missed. Now, when he came down the stairs with a shut mouth and blue lines under his eyes, Hephaistion received some mute signal he understood, and fell into step beside him. ~ Mary Renault

But walking down the stairs feeling each stair carefully and holding to the banister he thought, I must get her away and get her away as soon as I can without hurting her. Because I am not doing too well at this. That I can promise you. But what else can you do? Nothing, he thought. There's nothing you can do. But maybe, as you go along, you will get good at it. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

I look at all my projects as a stair step to the next. My goal is to always get better and better. ~ Andrae Crouch

Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today, I wish to hell he'd go away. ~ Gregory Maguire

What makes Argia different from other cities is that it has earth instead of air. The streets are completely filled with dirt, clay packs the rooms to the ceiling, on every stair another stairway is set in negative, over the roofs of the houses hang layers of rocky terrain like skies with clouds. We do not know if the inhabitants can move about the city, widening the worm tunnels and the crevices where roots twist: the dampness destroys people's bodies and they have scant strength; everyone is better off remaining still, prone; anyway, it is dark.
From up here, nothing of Argia can be seen; some say, "It's down below there," and we can only believe them. The place is deserted. At night, putting your ear to the ground, you can sometimes hear a door slam. ~ Italo Calvino

If we with earnest effort could succeed To make our life one long, connected prayer, As lives of some, perhaps, have been and are; If, never leaving Thee, we have no need Our wandering spirits back again to lead Into Thy presence, but continued there Like angels standing on the highest stair Of the Sapphire Throne: this were to pray indeed! ~ Richard Chenevix Trench

Half way down, he encountered Saphira, who had jammed her head and neck as far up the stair as she could, gouging the wood in her frenzy.
Little one. She flicked out her tongue and caught him on the hand with its rough tip. He smiled. Then she arched her neck and tried to pull back, but to no avail.
What's wrong?
I'm stuck.
You're ... He could not help it;he laughed even though it hurt. The situation was too absurd. ~ Christopher Paolini

Ask dumb questions and listen quietly for the answers. That's a wisdom stair climber. ~ Greg Gutfeld

Complains are like the clouds that produce no rain no matter how thick they gather. Never depend on your complaint thinking they are stair cases. Drop that thing. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

But to tell even a tenth part of the marvels rich and beautiful that were in the house of Krothering: its cool courts and colonnades rich with gems and fragrant with costly spices and strange blooms: its bed-chambers where, caught like Aphrodite in her golden net, the spirit of sleep seemed ever to shake slumber from its plumes, and none might be waking long in those chambers but sweet sleep overcame their eyelids: the Chamber of the Sun and the Chamber of the Moon, and the great middle hall with its high gallery and ivory stair: to tell of all these were but to cloy imagination with picturing in one while of over-much glory and splendour. ~ E.R. Eddison

Song

This is the love I bring,
Absolute and nothing:
A tree but with no roots,
A cloud heavy with fruit,
A wide stone stair
That leads nowhere
But to empty sky,
Ambiguous majesty.

This is the love I bear:
It is light as air,
Yet weighs like an earth;
It is water flowing,
Yet adamant as fire.
It is coming from going.
It is dying and growing.

A love so rare and hard
It cuts a diamond word
Upon the windowpane,
"Never, never again,
Never upon my breast,"
Having no time to bring,
Having no place to rest,
Absolute and nothing. ~ May Sarton

If there's no feast for this appetite
No reason in nursery rhymes
Why can't I shake this great and glorious lie?
And if there's no dawn beyond this dark
No secret stair to climb
Where did I learn the song that shakes the sky? ~ Jeffrey Overstreet

Today would rank as one of the stupidest things I'd done, taking the place of indoor stair skiing. ~ Ashlan Thomas

I hear music Mighty fine music, The murmur of a morning breeze up there The rattle of the milkman on the stair Sure that's music ... ~ Frank Loesser

What happened yesterday was a mistake, but it's over now. In the past, I've forgotten it, and so should you."
His brows rose. "You have forgotten? This, I do not believe." He stepped closer again. She retreated up another stair. "What passed between us was not forgettable. I am not forgettable. Not to you."
"You have a high opinion of yourself."
"No higher than deserved. But I know when a woman looks at me and likes what she sees. And I know when she wants more. ~ C.L. Wilson

Then there was a fine noise of rushing water from the crown of an oak at his back, as if a spigot there had been turned. Then the noise of fountains came from the crowns of all the tall trees. Why did he love storms, what was the meaning of his excitement when the door sprang open and the rain wind fled rudely up the stair, why had the simple task of shutting the windows of an old house seem fitting and urgent, why did the first watery notes of a storm wind have for him the unmistakable sound of good news, cheer, glad tidings? ~ John Cheever

Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be dangerous.) ~ Diane Setterfield

Turn from that road's beguiling ease; return
to your hunger's turret. Enter, climb the stair
chill with disuse, where the croaking toad of time
regards from shimmering eyes your slow ascent
and the drip, drip, of darkness glimmers on the stone
to show you how your longing waits alone.
What alchemy shines from under that shut door,
spinning out gold from the hollow of the heart?
("The Sea's Wash In The Hollow Of The Heart") ~ Denise Levertov

I ascend from darkness
And depart on the winds of space for I know not where;
My watch is wound, a key is in my pocket,
And the sky is darkened as I descend the stair. ~ Conrad Aiken

Love lent me wings; my path was like a stair;
A lamp unto my feet, that sun was given;
And death was safety and great joy to find;
But dying now, I shall not climb to Heaven. ~ Michelangelo

Oh, Spring is surely coming, Her couriers fill the air; Each morn are new arrivals, Each night her ways prepare; I scent her fragrant garments, Her foot is on the stair. ~ John Burroughs

Well-meanin' man. Did it all for the best." Stalky curled gracefully round the stair-rail. "Head in a drain-pipe. Full confession in the left boot. ~ Rudyard Kipling

my mother's wits were now in an attic of her head which had neither door nor stair, or at least none that I could find. ~ Sebastian Barry

Hand in hand, we climb the processional stair, rising in the celebratory uproar of a capricious court. As we enter the palace, we are blinded by the ascent from sunshine into darkness. ~ Katherine Longshore

Hatred is an unwanted domain of our heart. It obstructs the most harmonious way between you and your love. If you totally rely on what hate delivers, you'll be dazzled by its outcomes. So chase the path of love. Climb up the first stair and you won't need to wander over the entire staircase to look for its outcome. ~ Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal

She climbs a tree
And scrapes her knee
Her dress has got a tear.
She waltzes on her way to mass
And whistles on the stair.
And underneath her wimple
She has curlers in her hair!
Maria's not an asset to the abbey.

She's always late for chapel,
But her penitence is real.
She's always late for everything!
Except for every meal.
I hate to have to say it
But I very firmly feel
Maria's not an asset to the abbey!

I'd like to say a word on her behalf.
Maria makes me laugh.

How do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
How do you find a word that means Maria?
A flibbertigibbet!
A will o' the wisp!
A clown!

Many a thing you know you'd like to tell her,
Many a thing she ought to understand.
But how do you make her stay
And listen to all you say,
How do you keep a wave upon the sand?
Oh, how do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?

When I'm with her I'm confused
Out of focus and bemused,
And I never know exactly where I am.
Unpredictable as weather,
She's as flighty as a feather,
She's a darling,
She's a demon,
She's a lamb.

She'd out-pester any pest,
Drive a hornet from his nest,
She can throw a whirling dervish out of whirl.
She is gentle,
Rodgers & Hammerstein

Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future's endless stair;
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us.
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where.

Wrong or justice, joy or sorrow,
In the present what are they
while there's always jam-tomorrow,
While we tread the onward way?
Never knowing where we're going,
We can never go astray.

To whatever variation
Our posterity may turn
Hairy, squashy, or crustacean,
Bulbous-eyed or square of stern,
Tusked or toothless, mild or ruthless,
Towards that unknown god we yearn.

Ask not if it's god or devil,
Brethren, lest your words imply
Static norms of good and evil
(As in Plato) throned on high;
Such scholastic, inelastic,
Abstract yardsticks we deny.

Far too long have sages vainly
Glossed great Nature's simple text;
He who runs can read it plainly,
'Goodness = what comes next.'
By evolving, Life is solving
All the questions we perplexed.

Oh then! Value means survival-
Value. If our progeny
Spreads and spawns and licks each rival,
That will prove its deity
(Far from pleasant, by our present,
Standards, though it may well be). ~ C.S. Lewis

Desire to answer the incessant ring of the cell phone he'd ignored since yesterday. Rather than turning it off, he'd muffled the noise by burying the device deep within a coat pocket, maintaining the connection to his life like a distant beacon. Despite the oppressive heat, he paused at the bottom stair of his old brownstone. There was nothing spectacular about it, outside of its location near the upbeat Newbury Street. If he remembered ~ Ruth Cardello

Poorpeoplestaying intheir houses aslong astill thevery fire touched them, and then running into boats or clambering from one pair of stair by the waterside to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons I perceive were loath to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies till they were some of them burned, their wings, and fell down. ~ Samuel Pepys

As for my damned literature, God knows what a business it is, grinding along without a scrap of inspiration or a note of style. But it has to be ground, and the mill grinds exceeding slowly though not particularly small ... The treadmill turns; and, with a kind of desperate cheerfulness, I mount the idle stair. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Hugh refused to leave the scene of the action. He seated himself on the top stair in the hall, banged his head against the railing a few times, just by way of uncorking the vials of his wrath, and then subsided into gloomy silence, waiting to declare war if more "first girl babies" were thrust upon a family already surfeited with that unnecessary article. ~ Kate Douglas Wiggin

If you talk to anyone who's done a stair fall, there's not one stair fall, no matter how many pads you have on or how protected you are, where you don't hurt something really bad. ~ Lucas Till

You'll be found, your nickels, dimes and Indian-heads fused by electroplating. Abe Lincolns melted into Miss Columbias, eagles plucked raw on the backs of quarters, all run to quicksilver in your jeans. More! Any boy hit by lightning, lift his lid and there on his eyeball, pretty as the Lord's Prayer on a pin, find the last scene the boy ever saw! A box-Brownie photo, by God, of that fire climbing down the sky to blow you like a penny whistle, suck your soul back up along the bright stair! ~ Ray Bradbury

The Samuel Josephs were not a family. They were a swarm. The moment you entered the house they cropped up and jumped out at you from under the tables, through the stair rails, behind the doors, behind the coats in the passage. Impossible to count them: impossible to distinguish between them. ~ Katherine Mansfield

This holy staircase is composed of eight-and-twenty steps, said to have belonged to Pontius Pilate's house and to be the identical stair on which Our Saviour trod, in coming down from the judgment-seat. Pilgrims ascend it, only on their knees. It is steep; and, at the summit, is a chapel, reported to be full of relics; into which they peep through some iron bars, and then come down again, by one of two side staircases, which are not sacred, and may be walked on. ~ Charles Dickens

When you reach for a star, only angels are there. And it's not very far, just a step on a stair. ~ Kate Bush

And, Legolas, when the torches are kindled and men walk on the sandy floors under the echoing domes, ah! Then, Legolas, gems and crystals and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls; and the light glows through folded marbles, shell-like, translucent as the living hands of Queen Galadriel. There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose, Legolas, fluted and twisted into dreamlike forms; they spring up from many-coloured floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof: wings, ropes, curtains fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces! Still lakes mirror them: a glimmering world looks up from dark pools covered with clear glass; cities, such as the mind of Durin could scarce have imagined in his sleep, stretch on through avenues and pillared courts, on into the dark recesses where no light can come, And plink! A silver drop falls, and the round wrinkles in the glass make all the towers bend and waver like weeds and corals in a grotto of the sea. Then evening comes:" they fade and twinkle out; the torches pass on into another chamber and another dream. There is chamber after chamber, Legolas; hall opening out of hall, dome after dome, stair beyond stair; and still the winding paths lead on into the mountains' heart. Caves! The Caverns of Helm's Deep! Happy was the chance that drove me there! It makes me weep to leave them. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

If I had my life to live over, I'd dare to make more mistakes next time. I'd relax, I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I'd have fewer imaginary ones.

You see, I'm one of those people who lived sensibly and sanely, hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I've had my moments, and if I had to do it over again, I'd have more of them. In fact, I'd try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I've been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat and a parachute. If I had to do it again, I would travel lighter than I have.

If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies. ~ Nadine Stair

To pretend I was sliding down the stair rail." He laughed again. " You should have done it. I would have caught you at the bottom. ~ Gail Carson Levine

I am constantly working out-circuit training, jumping rope, and stair-stepping, and sticking to 1200 calories a day. It can't be something that you're doing to lose weight, and then once you do, you're done. I do it every day of my life. ~ LeAnn Rimes

He followed her into the bathroom and sat on the shut toilet seat while she washed her back with a brush. "I forgot to tell you," he said. "Liza sent us a wheel of Brie." "That's nice," she said, "but you know what? Brie gives me terribly loose bowels." He hitched up his genitals and crossed his legs. "That's funny," he said. "It constipates me." That was their marriage then
not the highest paving of the stair, the clatter of Italian fountains, the wind in the alien olive trees, but this: a jay-naked male and female discussing their bowels. ~ John Cheever

If one day I should hear the hacker's slow, booted step on the stair, perhaps I'll suggest a cup of tea and try to get the story of his life. ~ Alix Kates Shulman

To ask me is in vain;
For who goes up your winding stair
Can ne'er come down again. ~ Mary Howitt

From here she could see miles of dark emerald forest with just a few birds erupting from its depths like flying fish skimming an ocean ...
'Annabel!' Ewan called.
She looked down. He was standing in water, after all. So without a moment's trepidation, she launched herself from the downed carriage, coming home to his arms with all the security and the pleasure of child leaping from the second stair. ~ Eloisa James

And that touched off something else ... old sorrows, good friends gone down into the earth. Sometimes I picture death as a wide stone stair-case, filled with a silent procession of those being led away. ~ Sue Grafton

Failure
Because God put His adamantine fate
Between my sullen heart and its desire,
I swore that I would burst the Iron Gate,
Rise up, and curse Him on His throne of fire.
Earth shuddered at my crown of blasphemy,
But Love was as a flame about my feet;
Proud up the Golden Stair I strode; and beat
Thrice on the Gate, and entered with a cry
All the great courts were quiet in the sun,
And full of vacant echoes: moss had grown
Over the glassy pavement, and begun
To creep within the dusty council-halls.
An idle wind blew round an empty throne
And stirred the heavy curtains on the walls. ~ Rupert Brooke

At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitful face of hope and of despair ~ T. S. Eliot

No, books. She would have maybe twenty going at a time, lying all over our house
on the kitchen table, by her bed, the bathroom, our car, her bags, a little stack at the edge of each stair. And she'd use anything she could find for a bookmark. My missing sock, an apple core, her reading glasses, another book, a fork. ~ Kami Garcia

I know the stars by their names,
Aldebaran, Altair,
And I know the path they take
Up heaven's broad blue stair.

I know secrets of men
By the look of their eyes,
Their gray thoughts, their strange thoughts
Have made me sad and wise.

But your eyes are dark to me
Though they seem to call and call–
I cannot tell if you love me
Or do not love me at all.

I know many things,
But the years come and go,
I shall die not knowing
The thing I long to know. ~ Sara Teasdale

Man's books are but a climbing stair, Lain step by step, like stairs of stone; The stairway here, the temple there Man's lampad honor, and his trust, The God who called him from the dust. ~ Joaquin Miller

Footsteps shuffled on the stair/Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair/Spread out in fiery points/Glowed into words, then would be savagely still. ~ T. S. Eliot

I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent ~ William Butler Yeats

Poor children live in a particularly dangerous world
an urban world of broken stair railings, of busy streets serving as playgrounds, of lead paint, rats and rat poisons, or a rural world where families do not enjoy the minimal levels of public health accepted as standard for nearly a century. Whether in city or country, this is a world where cavities go unfilled and ear infections threatening permanent deafness go untreated. It is world where even a small child learns to be ashamed of the way he or she lives. ~ Kenneth Keniston

The corridor was still empty of all the feet in sad generations seeking water. yet the eyes unseeing clenched like teeth not disbelieving doubting even the absence of pain shin ankle knee the long invisible flowing of the stair-railing where a misstep in the darkness filled with sleeping Mother Father Caddy Jason Maury door I am not afraid only Mother Father Caddy Jason Maury geting so far ahead sleeping I will sleep fast when I door Door door It was empty too, the pipes, the porcelain, the stained quiet walls, the throne of contemplation. ~ William Faulkner

i can measure how sad i am
by how afraid i am of the dark
(rather, i mean, what's in the dark)
counting heart stops and stomach flops and
every stair creak, when everyone's asleep
(except me and my head and my shaky hands) ~ Savannah Brown