Stair Quotes & Sayings

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

Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot. — Stephen Fry

She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.
In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoined. How they'd loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin? — Margaret Atwood

Is it really possible that the finest sensations in life are simple: the delicate brush of Lou's hair across my chest, for instance? Yes. It is possible. Or was it the feeling I felt in each length as they drifted over me, the love I perceived in their gentle tickle? Yes. That was possible too. With Lou's soft first kiss, wasn't it mainly the miracle of its happening at all which made it so wondrous, so plainly impossible? And was I waiting on the stair for the world's wind to do the same, to display for me that rare union of meaning, gesture, and understanding, which the artist gnaws up knuckles to achieve? O. Oooh ... the decades I've done in and then abandoned without even waiting for the wounds to bleed! — William H Gass

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

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

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

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

The Waking
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go. — Theodore Roethke

If these were death agonies, they were fake ones, Costis thought, and was sure of it when they reached the shallow stair at the far end of the reflecting pool. No one on the verge of death has the strength to pile one foul word on top of another like a man compiling a layered pastry of obscene language, from the the bottom step all the way to the top. — Megan Whalen Turner

If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,
Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost
Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly. — Wallace Stevens

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

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

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

The rowdy gang of singers who sat at the scattered tables saw Arthur walk unsteadily to the head of the stairs, and though they must have all known that he was dead drunk, and seen the danger he would soon be in, no one attempted to talk to him and lead him back to his seat. With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins playing hide-and-seek inside his stomach, he fell from the top-most stair to the bottom. — Alan Sillitoe

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

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

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

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

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

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. - NADINE STAIR, EIGHTY-FIVE YEARS OLD, LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

We passed upon the stair, we spoke of was and when
Although I wasnt there, he said I was his friend
Which came as some surprise I spoke into his eyes
I thought you died alone, a long long time ago
Oh no, not me
I never lost control
Youre face to face
With the man who sold the world
I laughed and shook his hand, and made my way back home
I searched for form and land, for years and years I roamed
I gazed a gazely stare at all the millions here
We must have died along, a long long time ago
Who knows? not me
We never lost control
Youre face to face
With the man who sold the world
Who knows? not me
We never lost control
Youre face to face
With the man who sold the world — David Bowie

: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

Mother to Son

Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor -
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a'climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now -
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
- Langston Hughes (112) — Sapphire.

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

Used to be he
was my heart's desire.
His forthright gaze,
his expert hands:

I'd lie on the couch with my eyes
closed just thinking about it.
Never about the fact
that everything changes,

that even this,
my best passion,
would not be immune.
No, I would bask on in an

eternal daydream of the hands
finding me, the gaze like a winding
stair coaxing me down. . . .
Until I caught a glimpse

of something in the mirror:
silly girl in her lingerie,
dancing with the furniture--
a hot little bundle, flush with

cliches. Into that pair
of too-bright eyes I looked
and saw myself. And something else:
he would never look that way. — Deborah Garrison

Halfway down the stairs, is a stair, where I sit. There isn't any, other stair, quite like, it. I'm not at the bottom, I'm not at the top; So this is the stair, where, I always, stop. Halfway up the stairs, isn't up, and isn't down. It isn't in the nursery, it isn't in the town. And all sorts of funny thoughts, run round my head: It isn't really anywhere! It's somewhere else instead! — A.A. Milne

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

Sisters are always drying their hair. Locked into rooms, alone, they pose at the mirror, shoulders bare, trying this way and that their hair, or fly importunate down the stair to answer the telephone. — Phyllis McGinley

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today is hard but who cares, by each hard day we are making stair for us. — Avinash Prasad

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

Neither spoke, but lat silently listening to the ticking of the clock. A stair creaked, and a squeaky mouse scurried noisily through the wall. The darkness was oppressive, and after lying for some time screwing up his courage, he took the box of matches, and striking one, went downstairs for a candle.
At the foot of the stairs the match went out, and he paused to strike another; and at the same moment a knock came so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible, sounded on the front door.
The matches fell from his hand and spilled in the passage. He stood motionless, his breath suspended until the knock was repeated. Then he turned and fled swiftly back to his room, and closed the door behind him. A third knock sounded through the house. — W.W. Jacobs

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

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

Of all the names, one is a mistake. One is a nightmare. The stair you miss in the darkness. — Hannah Kent

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

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

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

Curiosity is a descending stair ... that leads to only who-knows-where. — Jasper Fforde

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

All rising to a great place is by a winding stair. — Francis Bacon

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

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

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

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

Every right quote is a golden stair to enlightenment! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair. — Langston Hughes

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 to readjust the way you thought of things. The Baudelaire orphans were crying not only for their Uncle Monty, but for their own parents, and this dark and curious feeling of falling that accompanies every great loss. — Lemony Snicket

Now journeys were not simple matters for Grace; nothing is simple if your mind is a fetch-and-carry wanderer from sliced perilous outer world to secret safe inner world; if when night comes your thought creeps out like a furred animal concealed in the dark, to fine, seize, and kill its food and drag it back to the secret house in the secret world, only to discover that the secret world has disappeared or has so enlarged that it's a public nightmare; if then strange beasts walk upside down like flies on the ceiling; crimson wings flap, the curtains fly; a sad man wearing a blue waistcoat with green buttons sits in the centre of the room, crying because he has swallowed the mirror and it hurts and he burps in flashes of glass and light; if crakes move and cry; the world is flipped, unrolled down in the vast marble stair; a stained threadbare carpet; the hollow silver dancing shoes, hunting-horns ... — Janet Frame

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

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

Most Wicked Words!-Forbear to Speak Them Out

Most wicked words!-forbear to speak them out.
Utter them not again; blaspheme no more
Against our love with maxims learned from Doubt:
Lest Death should get his foot inside the door.
We are surrounded by a hundred foes;
And he that at your bidding joins our feast,
I stake my heart upon it, is one of those,
Nor in their councils does he sit the least.
Hark not his whisper: he is Time's ally,
Kinsman to Death, and leman of Despair:
Believe that I shall love you till I die;
Believe; and thrust him forth; and arm the stair;
And top the walls with spikes and splintered glass
That he pass gutted should again he pass. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

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,

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

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

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

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

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

I won't go down the horrible street
To see the horrible people
I'll gladly climb the terrible stair
That leads to the terrible steeple
And the terrible rats
And the terrible bats
And the cats in the terrible steeple
But I won't go down the horrible street
To see the horrible people — James Thurber

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

Alone he staggered on until he found
Dawn's ghost that filtered down a shafted stair
To the dazed, muttering creatures underground
Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound. — Siegfried Sassoon

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

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

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

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

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

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

Madam Life's a piece in bloom Death goes dogging everywhere: she's the tenant of the room, he's the ruffian on the stair. — William Ernest Henley

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

You will never find it," his ghost says. "What?" "What you are looking for. You want to go back to the start. You want to go back to where you began. You want to find the happiness you once had. But you can never get there, because even if you somehow found it, you yourself would be different. You would have changed, from your journey alone, from the passing of time, if nothing else. You can never make it back to where you began, you can only ever climb another turn of the spiral stair. Forever. — Marcus Sedgwick

I thought the force of my wanting must wake ye, surely. And then ye did come ... " He stopped, looking at me with eyes gone soft and dark. "Christ, Claire, ye were so beautiful, there on the stair, wi' your hair down and the shadow of your body with the light behind ye ... ." He shook his head slowly. "I did think I should die, if I didna have ye," he said softly. "Just then. — Diana Gabaldon

I do a lot of running, and I do it every day. I run on a track, I run hills and I work the stair-stepper extremely hard. I do some type of cardio every day. In addition, I have a passion for golf, and that helps me stay fit, too. — Jerry Rice

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

Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill. — Arthur Conan Doyle

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

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

I should have guessed you were Jace's sister," he said. "You both have the same artistic talent."
Clary paused, her foot on the lowest stair. She was taken aback. "Jace can draw?"
Nah." When Alec smiled, his eyes lit like blue lamps and Clary could see what Magnus had found so captivating about him. "I was just kidding. He can't draw a straight line. — Cassandra Clare

The carpeting on the stair risers caught, racing up to the first-floor level as if to tell dreadful good news. — Stephen King

As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wan't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh I wish he'd go away! — William Hughes Mearns

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

I love my body. And if I didn't, I'd get on the Stair Master — Jaime Pressly

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

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

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

If I Must Go
If I must go to heaven's end
Climbing the ages like a stair,
Be near me and forever bend
With the same eyes above me there;
Time will fly past us like leaves flying,
We shall not heed, for we shall be
Beyond living, beyond dying,
Knowing and known unchangeably. — Sara Teasdale

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

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

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

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

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

I put a hand on my chest, leaning against the wood panels of the stair wall. Rhy's hand covered my own a heartbeat later. "That's what I felt," he said, "when I saw you smile that night we dined along the Sidra. — Sarah J. Maas

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

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