Stairwell Quotes & Sayings

I don't know if I'd want to be a Secret Service agent. In the movies, it's exciting and romantic and all that. Really, most of their job is standing in a hallway for 12 hours making sure somebody doesn't come through a doorway off of a stairwell. — Dennis Quaid

Stop treating your creativity like it's a tired, old, unhappy marriage (a grind, a drag) and start regarding it with the fresh eyes of a passionate lover. Even if you have only fifteen minutes a day in a stairwell alone with your creativity, take it. Go hide in that stairwell and make out with your art. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Sarah Lynn strides out of the stairwell. Lawrence watches her go. The door slushes shut behind her, and he turns to me with a tightened jaw. I want to tell him: No, no, you've got it all wrong. I don't care if you kiss a white girl. I don't care if you love a white girl. I just wish you'd chosen a white girl worthy of your love.
Lawrence's Adam's apple jerks up and down, and I realize that in addition to whatever else he's feeling, he's scared. He's in love with the darling of the school, Sarah Lynn Lancaster, ad he's afriad I'll expose his secret. I give a tiny shake of my head, wanting him to know he has nothing to fear, not from me. — Lauren Myracle

What is blindness? Where there should be a wall, her hands find nothing. Where there should be nothing, a table leg gouges her shin. Cars growl in the streets; leaves whisper in the sky; blood rustles through her inner ears. In the stairwell, in the kitchen, even beside her bed, grown-up voices speak of despair. — Anthony Doerr

Fill me I'm cold. Fill me I'm half way gone.
Would you crush me in the stairwell?
Could we just lie down? — Deborah Landau

Zane glanced toward the stairwell, then back to Nick. "How close are you?" he finally blurted out. "I have no frame of reference, other than the oorah and your tongue down his throat. — Abigail Roux

I have a secret. A big, fat, hairy secret. And I'm not talking minor-league stuff, like I once let Joseph Applebaum feel me up behind the seventh-grade stairwell or I got a Brazilian wax after work last Friday or I'm hiding a neon blue vibrator called the Electric Slide in my night table. Which I'm not, by the way. In case you were wondering. — Karen MacInerney

To know God is not a matter of education, but of illumination. The stairwell to illumination is utter fascination in the presence of God. Push out all other activities and come in silent wonder and admiration in the presence of God. Then God will open up His heart and illuminate Himself to you. — A.W. Tozer

The main objects of all science, the freedom and happiness of man ... [are] the sole objects of all legitimate government.
(A plaque with this quotation, with the first phrase omitted, is in the stairwell of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.) — Thomas Jefferson

I was a misfit, but I think most teenagers feel that way. I don't care if you were a popular jock or the kid who spent his lunch hours in a stairwell reading a book, we all seem to have dealt with insecurities of one kind or another throughout our high school years. — Charles De Lint

As we reach the next corner, the entire block ahead of us lights up with a rich purple glow. We backpedal, hunker down in a stairwell, and squint into the light. Something's happening to those illuminated by it. They're assaulted by . . . what? A sound? A wave? A laser? Weapons fall from their hands, fingers clutch their faces, as blood sprays from all visible orifices - eyes, noses, mouths, ears. In less than a minute, everyone's dead and the glow vanishes. — Suzanne Collins

As Tim followed me up the narrow stairwell, he playfully pinched my butt with every step, a pleasant (and painful
in a black-and-blue sort of way) reminder that all I had yearned for as a student twenty-five years before had come true, even if I hadn't taken the time to notice it until now: I was happy. At twenty years old, had I articulated what I thought I needed in life, I would have probably said a big house, a successful husband, and a great career. Yet all I really needed for true happiness was the homeless, unemployed bus driver right behind me, pinching my butt every step of the way. — Doreen Orion

Ha," I said. "Oh, ha-ha. Yeah, 'cause they love me. You see how many vampires are up here? Zero, right?"
One," said Eric, stepping out of the stairwell. — Charlaine Harris

Just then, in that instant, I saw His eyes. I recognised them. They were the eyes of that trembling father in a smoke-filled room on the ninety-third floor of Tower One, dialing his little girls for the last time. Those were the eyes behind that calming voice singing 'Amazing Grace' in a crowded and slippery stairwell, trapped outside a roof door when the ceilings began to cave. The eyes of the people who stayed behind with the handicapped victims waiting for police officers who never made it up the stairs. Those were the eyes of firemen who pushed me to safety, the doctor who cared for me for more than a year free of charge, the therapist who visited my home regularly so that I could sleep a little, the children who loved me, the brother who prayed nonstop, and the pastor who became my friend. Those were the eyes of God. — Leslie Haskin

You have your orders," Mab shouted at the guards. "To the Deeps with her."
The men led me from the great hall, taking me along a series of corridors to the back of the castle, then winding through another long corridor and into a spiraling stairwell that appeared to have no end. We went further and further down until finally it ended so deep in the ground it felt like a grave. My pulse quickened as we reached the bottom.
A single dark door lay ahead. — H.D. Smith

Hello, darling. Sorry about that. Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud. Especially that, but I should have known. You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back. — Richard Siken

Everyone is called, everyone is sent out ... The call of God can reach us on the assembly line and in the office, in the supermarket and in the stairwell, i.e., in the places of everyday life. — Pope Francis

When they got to thew bottom of the stairwell, they stopped dead. Blay's father was facing off with a lesser, a Civil War sword in one hand, a dagger in the other.
Behind his Joe Friday glasses, his eyes were lit like torches, and they flicked over for a split second. "Stay out of this. This one's mine."
The shit was done faster than you can say, Ninja Dad.
Blay's father went Ginsu on the slayer, carving the thing up like a turkey, then stabbing it back to the Omega. — J.R. Ward

God plants the talent and it grows, sustained by a spirit-given strength to endure, even in the midst of darkness. It thrives in the valleys of life and ignores the peaks. It blooms like a flower when cradled by the warmth of the sun. It remains in a hidden stairwell in a concentration camp. It grows, fed in secret, in the heart of every artist. — Kristy Cambron

I try to catch my breath and calm myself down, but it isn't easy. I was dead. I was dead, and then i wasn't, and why? Because of Peter? Peter? I stare at him. He still looks so innocent, despite all that he has done to prove that he is not. His hair lies smooth against his head, shiny and dark, like we didn't just run for a mile at full speed. His round eyes scan the stairwell and then rest on my face. "What?" he says. "Why are you looking at me like that?" " How did you do it?" I say. — Veronica Roth

She leaves him sitting there, glancing back just once before she goes through the stairwell door and observing how the cloud of smoke from his cigar gets pulled in wisps out the dark gaping hole in the glass wall
as though it is his soul, too large for his massive frame and seeping out the pores of his skin and wandering circuitous back into the wilderness where it knows itself true among the violent and the dead. — Alden Bell

Here, child, said Mae hastily Hide your eyes. Boys? Are you decent? What'd you put on to swim in? I got Winnie Foster in the house?
For goodness sake ma said Jesse emerging from the stairwell . You think were going to march around in our altogether with Winnie Foster in the house?
And Miles behind him sain we just jumped in with our clothes on too tired to shed them
It was true. They stood there side by side with their wet clothes plastered to their skins, little pools of water collecting at their feet. — Natalie Babbitt

a campus security officer who'd been waiting quietly in the corner of a stairwell landing told us that the top of the building was off-limits. He had an unlit cigarette in his mouth and a cell phone in his hands and looked for all the world like we'd just caught him about to take an unauthorized text and smoke break. What didn't quite jibe with that image was that most campus security guards don't look like they pick their teeth with a chainsaw, and their sidearms aren't made for moose hunting. — Elliott James

The stairway to the ministry is not a grand staircase but a back stairwell that leads down to the servants' quarters. — Edmund Clowney

I didn't say, "I'll call you." I didn't hug her because of the wet clothes. Just a quick kiss. Then I turned and left. I made my way quietly down the hallway to the stairwell. I could tell she thought she wasn't going to see me again. I had to admit she might be right. The knowledge was as damp and dispiriting as my sodden clothes. I came to the first floor and looked out at the entranceway of the building. For a second I pictured the way she had hugged me here. It already seemed like a long time ago. I felt an unpleasant mixture of gratitude and longing, streaked with guilt and regret. And in a flash of insight, cutting with cold clarity through the fog of my fatigue, I realized what I hadn't been able to articulate earlier, not even to myself, when she'd asked me what I was afraid of. It had been this, the moment after, when I would come face to face with knowing that it would all end badly, if not this morning, then the next one. Or the one after that. — Barry Eisler

Rook. You fit me. When I saw you crouching in that stairwell last week I felt like I knew you. You stopped me dead in my tracks, you wiped my mind. — J.A. Huss

This wasn't the way I had imagined my adventures, but reality ignored my wishes from the get-go, giving me a body best suited for stacking books in the library, injecting so much fear into my veins that I could only cower in the stairwell when the violence came. Maybe someday my arms and legs would thicken with muscle and the fear would drain away like dirty bathwater. I wish I believed these things would happen, but I didn't. — David Benioff

Alec took a deep breath and let it out. Well, he'd come this far; he might as well go on. The bare lightbulb hanging overhead cast sweeping shadows as he reached forward and pressed the buzzer.
A moment later a voice echoed through the stairwell. "WHO CALLS UPON THE HIGH WARLOCK?"
"Er," Alec said. "It's me. I mean, Alec. Alec Lightwood."
There was a sort of silence, as if even the hallway itself were surprised. Then a ping, and the second door opened, letting him out onto the stairwell. He headed up the rickety stairs into the darkness, which smelled like pizza and dust. The second floor landing was bright, the door at the far end open. Magnus Bane was leaning in the entryway. — Cassandra Clare

We're always upstairs. We're not the madwomen in the attic
they get lots of play, one way or another. We're the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound. In our lives of quiet desperation, the woman upstairs is who we are, with or without a goddamn tabby or a pesky lolloping Labrador, and not a soul registers that we are furious. We're completely invisible. I thought it wasn't true, or not true of me, but I've learned I am no different at all. The question now is how to work it, how to use that invisibility, to make it burn. — Claire Messud

These guys fart a lot as well. I'm not saying that girls don't. We just aren't as passionate about them. The smell is sometimes overwhelming and I want to gag. They don't just limit these attacks to the classroom-they can come at you from anywhere around the school. The corridor, the stairwell, the canteen line. There's one area we call Fart Corridor because it belongs to the Year Eights and Nines, who are the biggest perpetrators. They make no apologies and feel no embarrassment. If a girl did one at St. Stella's she'd be an outcast for the rest of her natural life. Here, it's a badge of honor. — Melina Marchetta

The window opened in the same direction as the king's, and there, summer-bright and framed by the darkness of the stairwell, was the same view. Costis passed it, and then went back up the stairs to look again. There were only the roofs of the lower part of the palace and the town and the city walls. Beyond those were the hills on the far side of the Tustis Valley and the faded blue sky above them. It wasn't what the king saw that was important, it was what he couldn't see when he sat at the window with his face turned toward Eddis. — Megan Whalen Turner

What must it be like, Maureen wondered, to be that size? To be that strong? To know you can show your back to every dark stairwell, doorway, and alley. To have people stare at their shoes and not at your tits when you caught them looking. For people to step aside and not "accidentally" brush up against you when they passed in close quarters. What's it like to be that big instead of five-four, a hundred pounds, and female? For one week, for one day, I wanna be that size. A guy that size. — Bill Loehfelm

I'm not a princess
This ain't a fairy tale
I'm not the one you'll sweep off her feet
Lead her up a stairwell
This ain't Hollywood
This is a small town
I was a dreamer before you went and let me down
Now it's too late for you and your white horse to come around — Taylor Swift

Behind her, the door to the stairwell opens, and Tobias steps out with Marcus and Caleb behind him, almost unnoticed.
Almost, except I notice him, because I have trained myself to notice him. — Veronica Roth

Still, I'm not convinced that you were right, Dai
that it's such a bad thing, a useless enterprise to reel and reel out my memory at night. Some part of me, the human part of me, is kept alive by this, I think. Like water flushing a wound, to prevent it from closing. I am a lucky one, like Chiyo says. I made a terrible mistake. In Gifu, in my raggedy clothes, I had an unreckonable power. I didn't know it at the time. But when I return to the stairwell now, I can feel them webbing around me: my choices, their infinite variety, spiraling out of my hands, my invisible thread. Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose. It's become my sanctuary here in Nowhere Mill. A threshold where I still exist. — Karen Russell

I have always had a weakness for footnotes. For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a text. And I see that I am now using a long footnote to open a serious subject - shifting in a quick move to Paris, to a penthouse in the Hotel Crillon. Early June. Breakfast time. The host is my good friend Professor Ravelstein, Abe Ravelstein. My wife and I, also staying at the Crillon, have a room below, on the sixth floor. She is still asleep. The entire floor below ours (this is not absolutely relevant but somehow I can't avoid mentioning it) is occupied just now by Michael Jackson and his entourage. He performs nightly in some vast Parisian auditorium. Very soon his French fans will arrive and a crowd of faces will be turned upward, shouting in unison, 'Miekell Jack-sown'. A police barrier holds the fans back. Inside, from the sixth floor, when you look down the marble stairwell you see Michael's bodyguards. One of them is doing the crossword puzzle in the 'Paris Herald'. — Saul Bellow

The only clouds are pale and thin, hung as high as they can manage, like cobwebs in the high arches of a stairwell, and the sky is a freshly scrubbed blue, as permanent-looking as the first day of the holidays. — Jon McGregor

Years passed. The trees in our yard grew taller. I watched my family and my friends and neighbors, the teachers whom I'd had or imaged having, the high school I had dreamed about. As I sat in the gazebo I would pretend instead that I was sitting on the topmost branch of the maple under which my brother had swallowed a stick and still played hide-and-seek with Nate, or I would perch on the railing of a stairwell in New York and wait for Ruth to pass near. I would study with Ray. Drive the Pacific Coast Highway on a warm afternoon of salty air with my mother. But I would end each day with my father in his den.
I would lay these photographs down in my mind, those gathered from my constant watching, and I could trace how one thing- my death- connected these images to a single source. No one could have predicted how my loss would change small moments on Earth. But I held on to those moments, hoarded them. None of them were lost as long as I was there. — Alice Sebold

There's a cough behind me, and I find Cheeseburger staring anxiously at my box. I glare at Amanda, the Arm-Toucher, and pull out an entire sleeve of Thin Mints. "Here you go, Cheeseburger."
He looks at me in surprise, but then again, that's how he always looks. "Wow. Thanks Anna." Cheeseburger takes the cookies and lumbers toward the stairwell.
Josh is horrified. "Whyareyougivingawaythecookies? — Stephanie Perkins

The man stands behind the man.
The seated man thinks,
"For heaven's sake, stop standing behind me.
You are driving me mad. It is February and it is impossible.
Someone has thrown onion skins all over the stairwell. Now I will have to clean them up - though I love to sweep. But still, it is disgusting."
But all he says is "I have to go soon."
Why can't people tell the truth?
It is impossible not to lie.
It is February and not lying is impossible. — Maira Kalman

Crokus jumped at a faint plopping sound from the stairwell. He laid his hands on his knives, tensing. — Steven Erikson

As a result of these news stories, millions of people must have become aware of "niggardly," who otherwise would never have heard it, let alone thought to use it. If this is right, and the word has a new currency, it is probably not the currency I would wish for. The word's new lease of life is probably among manufacturers and retailers of sophomoric humor. I bet that even as I write, some adolescent boys, in the stairwell of some high school somewhere in America, are accusing each other of being niggardly, and sniggering at their own outrageous wit. I bet ... Wait a minute. Sniggering? Oh, my God ... — John Derbyshire

Master, the paintings, the paintings in the storage rooms!" I cried.
"Forget the paintings. It's too late. Boys, run from here, get out now, save yourselves from the fire."
Knocking the attackers back, he shot up the stairwell and called down to me from the uppermost railing. "Come, Amadeo, fight them off, believe in your strength, child, fight. — Anne Rice

Joe, you did fine," Mercer says. "You were great. But there is no question that we are in the shit. We are in the savage jungle. For some reason, which I do not yet apprehend, there are titans stirring in the deeps and shadows on the stairwell. As my youngest cousin Lawrence would say, we are up to our necks in podu. This, incidentally, is Reggie, who is one of my occasional thugs," indicating the gnarled youth on his left. "Now retiring to become a vet, would you believe, but for the next ten minutes you can trust him with your life, only don't, trust me instead. Anyway ... good evening, and what the fuck is going on, and try the lamb, it's excellent. — Nick Harkaway

She knows how to feed her soul with a few quick breaths of outdoor air from the stairwell. She can bide her time till freedom comes. Little fox lady with her bright and determined eyes ... taking her dose of freedom three times a day. Nothing else matters, she never stops to talk. She has better places to be than standing talking to other sick people. She has a fragment of home calling. — Michelle Frost

In the lift up to Larry's apartment on the sixth floor he [Lacke] started to cry. Not quietly, no; he wailed like a kid, but worse, more. When Larry opened the lift door and pushed him out onto the landing the cry deepened, started to reverberate against the concrete walls. Lacke's scream of primal, bottomless sorrow filled te stairwell from top to bottom, streamed through the letter slots, keyholes, transformed the high rise into one big tomb erected in the memory of love, hope. — John Ajvide Lindqvist

I have no words for you, Rook Walsh." "Try," I whisper back as I stare hungrily into his eyes. He brings his palms to my face and tilts my chin. "I could describe what you look like, but that's not what I see. You are so much more than a body inside a dress, Rook. You fit me. When I saw you crouching in that stairwell last week I felt like I knew you. You stopped me dead in my tracks, you wiped my mind. And I reached out to touch you that day because I couldn't resist. I needed to do it and I plan on touching you all night, on the way there in the car, through dinner, as we walk around the zoo and do whatever the hell it is they do at a nighttime fundraiser, and all the way home. — J.A. Huss

There's a thing at the Museum of Natural History in New York, where I live: they have a stairwell where you follow the beginning and the course of this planet, and it's a very long stairwell, and you follow, and you follow, and then you reach the top, and we're, like, half a step on the stairwell - the timeline for us on this planet. — Peter Dinklage

In the back corner, a stairwell led down. It was blocked by a row of iron bars like a prison door. Percy wondered what was down there - monsters? Treasure? Amnesiac demigods who had gotten on Reyna's bad side? — Rick Riordan

Park is faster, but their pursuit seems almost ideological - a matter of committed belief. It's as though they were appointed to the task of laying hands on him, of bringing him back into the gentle fold, of taking him home.

They follow him all the way down to the ground floor. He bursts through the stairwell door, sprints down the hall, and ducks into an alcove where two vending machines stand gutted, their weighty doors cracked opened with a prybar. He wedges his body between them, pulls the knife and crouches down. His pulse is throbbing. He struggles to regain his breath, to silence himself. — Jonathan R. Miller

When I was 16 or 17, I remember kissing one of my first girlfriends, Kim Anderson, under a stairwell at Disneyland. I'll never forget that feeling. — John Stamos

In Norwegian that would be 'hun ma dra. Kanskje er hun gravid.'" Astley sttempts to smile.
i can't help teasing him. "Which? Asking to go to the bathroom or dissing me because I'm pregnant."
"you are with child?" his eyes open wid, all mock terrified.
"No! Shut up. You know I'm not." I punch him in the arm and then lead him into the stairwell, shutting the door behind us. "Okay. Seriously, Astley, what happened to you? Why is your head bleeding? — Carrie Jones

I turned around and headed back to the stairwell, planning to go downstairs and buy a chocolate bar from the vending machine. Maybe it would fall on me and end my misery. — Kenneth Oppel

the stairwell and into the room where I will decide the rest of my life. The room is arranged in concentric circles. On the edges stand the sixteen-year-olds — Veronica Roth