Below Stairs Quotes & Sayings

might almost be over. That's when it happens. There's a rumbling sound that is low at first but begins to build in volume. The tunnel trembles slightly. All the fighting stops immediately; people get to their feet, look around. Mark's doing the same, trying to find the source of the noise. He's still holding Trina's hand. "What is that?" she shouts. Mark shakes his head, keeps sweeping his gaze around the tunnel. The floor vibrates below his feet and the rumbling sound gets louder, becomes an outright roar. His eyes fall upon the stairs that lead up from the subtrans concourse just as the screams erupt - countless, countless screams and the blur of panicked movement in the crowd. A monstrous wall of filthy water is pouring down the wide steps. — James Dashner

I didn't think students were allowed below the main floor. I knew the kitchens were there, as were most of the servants' quarters; the professors and Mrs. Westcliffe had their own aboveground wing on the other side of the castle. No one had ever specifically told me not to go below stairs, however-probably because a true Iverson girl would never, ever dream of mingling with the help.
I could always say I'd gotten lost. The pillars of the world would hardly collapse. The sky would not shatter. I was barely a hairbreadth away from being the help myself. — Shana Abe

Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The girl with the greyhound was an assistant lighting director for a musical comedy about American history, and she kept her poor greyhound, who was named Lancer, in a one-room apartment fourteen feet wide and twenty-six feet long, and six flights of stairs above the street level. His entire life was devoted to unloading his excrement at the proper time and place. There were two proper places to put it: in the gutter outside the door seventy-two steps below, with the traffic whizzing by, or in a roasting pan, his mistress kept in front of the Westinghouse refrigerator.
Lancer had a very small brain, but he must have suspected from time to time, just as Wayne Hoobler did, that some kind of terrible mistake had been made. — Kurt Vonnegut

On a hot day in Virginia, I know nothing more comforting than a fine spiced pickle, brought up trout-like from the sparkling depths of the aromatic jar below the stairs of Aunt Sally's cellar. — Thomas Jefferson

He smirked. "Does someone have a hangover?" "No," she said in a loud whisper, shaking her head with vehemence and setting jackhammers off against her temples. "I'm not dressed for company." "I heard you scream. What happened?" For the love of god, must she be tested at every turn? She tilted her chin and said in her most haughty tone, "If you must know, I almost fell down the stairs." Faster than a man his size should move, he rounded the stairs and bounded up the steps two at a time, stopping when he stood one below her. Of course, she still had to peer up at him, irritating her further. "Are you okay?" he asked, those golden eyes warm with concern. "I'm fine." She straightened to her full five-three, but still felt small and dowdy next to him. "You're not hurt?" "For God's sake, I'm fine. It was just a little stumble." He chuckled, the deep, rich timbre sending tingles down her spine. "And here I thought you wouldn't be any fun sober." Her — Jennifer Dawson

Hobie's presence below stairs was an anchor, a friendly weight ... — Donna Tartt

History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below. — Voltaire

She stared at me curiously. Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Sometimes, when I walk along the corridor here, I fancy I hear her just behind me. That quick, light footstep. I could not mistake it anywhere. And in the minstrels' gallery above the hall. I've seen her leaning there, in the evenings in the old days, looking down at the hall below and calling to the dogs. I can fancy her there now from time to time. It's almost as though I catch the sound of her dress sweeping the stairs as she comes down to dinner." She paused. She went on looking at me, watching my eyes. "Do you think she can see us, talking to one another now?" she said slowly. "Do you think the dead come back and watch the living? — Daphne Du Maurier

We stood as the ground shifted
and we saw the view from below
through tiled floors
and concrete stairs,
our feet burning holes in the foundation
while you whispered of dreams. — Marie Anzalone

The library was my only blessing. Every time I climbed the stairs, my heart lifted. All day, I looked forward to the happy hours I spent in that beautiful room. My guilt over appa's fate was too heavy to carry up there, and I learned to leave it below, somewhere on the ground floor. I left the house far behind as I walked on the path paved by the books, and every evening, baby Mangalam slept soundly on the bed I made for her on the window seat. — Padma Venkatraman

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

The intruder took a step forward, and Moody's voice asked, "Severus Snape?" Then the dust figure rose from the end of the hall and rushed him, raising its dead hand.
"It was not I who killed you, Albus," said a quiet voice.
The jinx broke: The dust-figure exploded again, and it was impossible to make out the newcomer through the dense gray cloud it left behind.
Harry pointed his wand into the middle of it.
"Don't move!"
He had forgotten the portrait of Mrs. Black: At the sound of his yell, the curtains hiding her flew open and she began to scream, "Mudbloods and filth dishonoring my house--"
Ron and Hermione came crashing down the stairs behind Harry, wants pointing, like his, at the unknown man now standing with his arms raised in the hall below.
"Hold your fire, it's me, Remus!"
"Oh, thank goodness," said Hermione weakly, pointing her wand at Mrs. Black instead; with a bang, the curtains swished shut again and silence fell. — J.K. Rowling

Murdered man anywhere. Everything belonging to him had been destroyed. He himself had burned what had been below-stairs. The world would simply say that he was mad. — Oscar Wilde

He started with the rascal's questions.
Where was he?
dangling fifty feat above ground choking to death
Were there friends near by?
He could hear his sister strugling by the stairs, but she was too far to help
Were there weapons nearby?
His fishhook was lying useless on the ground below, leaving him only his hands.
But his were no ordinary hands. — Jonathan Auxier

A vile beastly rottenheaded foolbegotten brazenthroated pernicous piggish screaming, tearing, roaring, perplexing, splitmecrackle crashmecriggle insane ass of a woman is practising howling below-stairs with a brute of a singingmaster so horribly, that my head is nearly off. — Edward Lear

Dove held out a hand to Johnson, and he took it - not because they were fleeing a fire and not because she was holding a million dollars. He took her hand to wrap his fingers around hers.
His long, long fingers.
Her knees went a little watery. Johnson placed a hand on her lower back to steady her. Her ass went a little watery. The trip up her stairs took longer than Ulysses on his epic journey. Johnson took the keys from her hand and opened her door. — Debra Anastasia

The dowager rose and slipped from her pew. There was the sound of tearing silk as she threw up her arms to embrace her son. Then:
"Oh, Rupert, darling," she exclaimed in tones of theatrical despair, "don't you see? The game's up! — Eva Ibbotson

But as he reached the bottom of the stairs, a figure appeared in the shadowy passage below and scurried up the stairs past him. He froze. His mind flashed light and dark. His heart rate accelerated. The woman he had just passed - the voice had belonged to the new housemaid. But the face belonged to the woman who haunted his dreams. Margaret Macy. — Julie Klassen

But it was a happy and beautiful bride who came down the old, homespun-
carpeted stairs that September noon - the first bride of Green Gables, slender and shining-eyed, in the mist of her maiden veil, with her arms full of roses. Gilbert, waiting for her in the hall below, looked up at her with adoring eyes. She was his at last, this evasive, long-sought Anne, won after years of patient waiting. It was to him she was coming in the sweet surrender of the bride. Was he worthy of her? Could he make her as happy as he hoped? If he failed her - if he could not measure up to her standard of manhood - then, as she held out her hand, their eyes met and all doubt was swept away in a glad certainty. They belonged to each other; and, no matter what life might hold for them, it could never alter that. Their happiness was in each other's keeping and both were unafraid. — L.M. Montgomery

running to and fro with trays of refreshments. Odo, who knew that his mother lived in the Duke's palace, had vaguely imagined that his father's death must have plunged its huge precincts into silence and mourning; but as he followed the abate up successive flights of stairs and down long corridors full of shadow he heard a sound of dance music below and caught the flash of girandoles through the antechamber doors. The thought that his father's death had made no difference to any one in the palace was to the child so much more astonishing than any of the other impressions crowding his brain, that these were scarcely felt, and he passed as in a dream through rooms where servants were quarrelling over cards and waiting-women rummaged in wardrobes full of perfumed finery, to a bedchamber in which a lady dressed in weeds sat disconsolately at supper. "Mamma! Mamma!" he cried, springing — Edith Wharton

Coneybeare didn't put his cigarette out. He merely let it slip from between his long fingers, and it fell down the space between the stairs. Barnes watched, dismayed at the distance, as the red ember disappeared in the darkness, and then, like Coneybeare, he did the same, dropping his cigarette and counting one one thousand, two one thousand, as it fell, a disappearing red dot in the darkness below. — Joseph G. Peterson

By June 1949 people had begun to realize that it was not so easy to get a program right as had at one time appeared. I well remember when this realization first came on me with full force. The EDSAC was on the top floor of the building and the tape-punching and editing equipment one floor below on a gallery that ran round the room in which the differential analyzer was installed. I was trying to get working my first non-trivial program, which was one for the numerical integration of Airy's differential equation. It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that "hesitating at the angles of stairs" the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs. — Martin Campbell-Kelly

In Search of Honor'."They tied my hands behind my back and led me up three flights of stairs. The damp, cold, and darkness increased as we ascended, and I berated myself for having left my jacket in the cell below. When we could go no higher, they freed my hands and unlocked one of the heavy doors. Then shoving me inside, they slammed it shut. — Donna Lynn Hess

Don't you think the stairs are a good place for reading letters? I do. One is somehow suspended. One is on neutral ground - not in one's own world nor in a strange one. They are an almost perfect meeting place. Oh Heavens! How stairs do fascinate me when I think of it. Waiting for people - sitting on strange stairs - hearing steps far above, watching the light playing by itself - hearing - far below a door, looking down into a kind of dim brightness, watching someone come up. But I could go on forever. Must put them in a story though! People come out of themselves on stairs - they issue forth, unprotected. — Katherine Mansfield

Our field is the sky,
tilled by the sweat of motors,
in the face of night,
at the risk of our dreams
... . ... ... ... ...
Who lived there? Whose hands were pure?
Who glowed in the night,
A ghost to other ghosts?
Who lives down below? Who cries ... .
Who has lost the key to their house?
Who can't find their bed, who is sleeping
on the steps of the stairs? When morning comes, who will
dare interpret the silvery trace: look above me ... When the
water pushes the watermill wheel once again,
who will dare remember the night? — Ingeborg Bachmann

She's like snow in Russian," said Anna. "Snow in the evening when the sun sets and it looks like Alpengluhen, you know? And if snow had a scent it would smell like that [the rose] ... — Eva Ibbotson

The patient man is merry indeed ... The jailers that watch him are but his pages of honour, and his very dungeon but the lower side of the vault of heaven. He kisseth the wheel that must kill him; and thinks the stairs of the scaffold of his martyrdom but so many degrees of his ascent to glory. The tormentors are weary of him. the beholders have pitty on him, all men wonder at him; and while he seems below all men, below himself, he is above nature. He hath so overcome hlmself that nothing can conquer him. — Thomas Adams

The alphabet was an invention below stairs. — David Sacks