Woman Upstairs Quotes & Sayings

I was so afraid that I'd never be able to love anyone, and here I was, holding a child I desperately wanted to call my own and upstairs was a woman I would give my life for.
Turns out I was always capable of love, I just hadn't found it yet. — J.L. Berg

C'mon. He'd be embarrassing upstairs at the White House. So I think she'd have a hard time. I think a woman president would have to be very conservative to get elected. — Chris Matthews

It is possible to lead several lives at once. In fact, it is impossible not to. Sometimes these lives overlap and interact. It is busy work living them and it requires stamina that a singular life doesn't need. Sometimes these lives live peaceably in the house of the body. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they grouse and bicker and storm upstairs and shout from windows and don't take out the trash. Some other times, these lives, these several lives, each indulge several lives of their own. And those lives, like rabbits or rodents, multiply, make children of themselves. And those child lives birth others. This is when a woman ceases leading her own life. This is when the lives start leading her. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

We talk a bit, until Tess is sufficiently calm, and then I take her upstairs and see her snuggled back into bed with Cyclops and one of Maura's romance novels. Strange bedfellows, but both seem to comfort her, and it serves to remind me again that she is a strange mix of woman and child, carrying a burden far too heavy for her. — Jessica Spotswood

How destiny plays games so thrilling,
both stay in the same building.
His books declared for the best seller of the year,
and she lives in the apartment to his but upstairs.
He is making fame, she has committed suicide severe.


The same window of the tall building instigated,
such varied colors.

In the woman-frustration and fear.
In the man- an inspiration so rare.
They share the same height, same sight,
of the same building.
From which,
one flew like kite and the other down right. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

AFTER LETTING VAUGHN inside, Sidney excused herself to change out of her dress and heels. Sadly,
she did not invite him upstairs to join her.
So instead, Vaughn settled for watching the sway of her hips as she walked up the steps. Sometimes
he didn't know whether he was coming or going with this woman. In the car, he'd thought there'd
been a little flirtation going on between them, but for all he knew "fingers sandwiches and minicakes"
really meant ... finger sandwiches and minicakes. — Julie James

Repeatedly Yates went berserk - raging over grievances old and new, hurling furniture at phantoms out of his past. The nurses who lived upstairs complained about the racket to the landlady, an eccentric woman who adored Yates and did nothing. — Blake Bailey

My motivation, even in anticipated shame, lay always in others. You can take the woman out of the upstairs, but you can't take the upstairs out of her. — Claire Messud

Nothing is as irritating as the fellow who chats pleasantly while he's overcharging you. — Kin Hubbard

I remember one time I heard this English professor asking the class what the world's scariest noise is. Is it a man crying out in pain? A woman's scream of terror? A gunshot? A baby crying? And the professor shakes his head and says, 'No, the scariest noise is, you're all alone in your dark house, you know you're all alone, you know that there is no chance anyone else is home or within miles - and then, suddenly, from upstairs, you hear the toilet flush. — Harlan Coben

The intensest feeling of the beauty of a cloud lighted by the setting sun, is no hindrance to my knowing that the cloud is a vapour of water, subject to all the laws of vapours in a state of suspension; and I am just as likely to allow for, and act on, these physical laws whenever there is occasion to do so, as if I had been incapable of perceiving any distinction between beauty and ugliness. — John Stuart Mill

An alcoholic. Amy stopped pushing her thumb against the dashboard. His mother had not been baking cookies. Probably she had been upstairs drinking gin from a bottle stored under the bed. Amy didn't have a clear idea of what a woman alcoholic (a mother alcoholic) would be like, but her own mother had told her once that such women got very sneaky, hiding bottles under their bed. — Elizabeth Strout

When you're the Woman Upstairs, nobody thinks of you first. Nobody calls you before anyone else, or sends you the first postcard. Once your mother dies, nobody loves you best of all. It's a small thing, you might think; and maybe it depends upon your temperament; maybe for some people it's a small thing. But for me, in that cul-de-sac outside Aunt Baby's, with my father and aunt done dissecting death and shuffling off to bed behind the crimson farmhouse door, preparing for morning mass as blameless as lambs and as lifeless as the slaughtered - I felt forsaken by hope. I felt I'd been seen, and seen clearly, and discarded, dropped back into the undiscriminated pile like a shell upon the shore. — Claire Messud

The woman rolled her eyes. "DarkRiver males are damn possessive and complete exhibitionists during the mating dance."
Sascha ran through her dictionary of changeling terminology and could find no fit. "Mating dance?"
Mercy whistled. Dorian winced. Tamsyn suddenly got interested in her dough. Clay and Vaughn mysteriously disappeared. Behind her, Lucas's body was a hard wall of heat. "I think we need to discuss this upstairs. — Nalini Singh

When you are the woman upstairs, nobody thinks of you first. Nobody calls you before anyone else, or sends you the first postcard. Once your mother dies, nobody loves you "best of all." It's a small thing, you might think, and maybe it depends on your temperament, maybe for some people it's a small thing, but for me [ ... ] — Claire Messud

The maid came in to light up and soon it would be time to go upstairs and change for dinner. I thought this woman one of the most fascinating I had ever seen. She had a long thin face, dead white, or powdered dead white. Her hair was black and lively under her cap, her eyes so small that the first time I saw her I thought she was blind. But wide open, they were the most astonishing blue, cornflower blue, no, more like sparks of blue fire. Then she would drop her eyelids and her face would go dead and lifeless again. I never tired of watching this transformation. — Jean Rhys

He can't understand that what I've done was to ensure his safety. He thinks I'm a monster. A burden that he has to endure. A danger to the family. He wants nothing to do with me and avoids me. When he can't avoid me he has a look in his eye that I know well, and the look says, 'Why won't she die? Why won't she just die?' I'm like that room upstairs; he just wants to close the door and forget any of it happened. He wants to close the door so eventually, like our mother, I'll become the beautiful woman that died too young and nothing more. All my sins will be forgotten and hidden, locked away never to be spoken of again — Angelique Jones

Socialism and the woman movement are two mighty streams which drag along with them great parts of the firm formations which they touch. — Ellen Key

And when we describe it as I shall do, it becomes plain that imagination is a specifically human gift. To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man. — Jacob Bronowski

What we need to do is recognize inner nature and work with things as they are. When we don't we get in trouble. — Benjamin Hoff

A supremely religious man or woman is one who believes deeply and consistently in the veracity of his highest experiences. He has his hours in the cellar ... but he believes in the truth of the hours he spends upstairs. — Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

Making you believe what he wanted you to believe was his very reason for being. Maybe his only reason. I was intrigued by the way he turned events, or hints I had given him about people, into reality
that is, his kind of reality. This obsessive reinvention of the real never stopped, what-could-be having always to top what is.
...
I began to wonder which was real, the woman in the book or the one I was pretending to be upstairs. Neither of them was particularly "me." I was acting just as much upstairs; I was not myself just as much Maria in the book was not myself. Perhaps she was. I began not to know which was true and which was not, like a writer who comes to believe that he's imagined what he hasn't.
...
The book began living in me all the time, more than my everyday life. — Philip Roth

Actually, you know who gave the shortest inauguration speech in history? George Washington. It was only like three minutes long. Well, sure. George Washington couldn't tell a lie. — Jay Leno

I'm never going to get used to hearing a woman talk like that."
"Shocking, is it?"
"Hard to shock an old sailor," he said. "But I'd love to see you try."
"Come upstairs," she said. "We'll see what I can do. — Tiffany Reisz

fear. 'Don't go inside.' He placed his hands on her shoulders. 'We've called an ambulance and the police. There's nothing more we can do.' Claire shrugged his hands from her and pushed past him. 'I am the police,' she said over her shoulder, and stepped through the front door. She looked around and heard commotion coming from above. Her eyes travelled towards the stairs as she heard a woman screaming. Then came the sound of other people running around the landing overhead. Claire closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She didn't have to see upstairs to know what had been discovered. She was about to ascend the stairs when she heard the sirens in the background, drawing closer. Just then two more people came running down — T.M.E. Walsh

For discipline is the channel in which our acts run strong and deep; where there is no direction, the deeds of men run shallow and wander and are wasted. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Our history told of kings that smiled and kings that conquered. He was the latter. — Rachel E. Carter

We walk past the house with the blue door. It has been made clear to us that we are to walk quietly by this house, never accept an invitation to step inside, never return the smile of the woman of the house, nor glance at the old man who sometimes looks out of the upstairs window; at our peril are we to be tempted by the flowers lying under the eaves, or by the figs that the storms shake loose. But our shadows dare each other. One of them is foolish enough to climb on to the doorstep but is pulled away just before it can reach the door bell. — Nadeem Aslam

Ask open ended questions. Pull out the pain and the hurt your prospect is experiencing. — Timi Nadela

It is easier to understand if you think of it in terms of music. Sometimes a man enjoys a symphony. Elsetimes he finds a jig more suited to his taste.
The same holds true for lovemaking. One type is suited to the deep cushions of a twilight forest glade. Another comes quite naturally tangled in the sheets of narrow beds upstairs in inns. Each woman is like an instrument, waiting to be learned, loved, and finely played, to have at last her own true music made.
Some might take offense at this way of seeing things, not understanding how a trouper views his music. They might think I degrade women. They might consider me callous, or boorish, or crude.
But those people do not understand love, or music, or me. — Patrick Rothfuss

Stahl trailed him upstairs, across a mezzanine, and out into the darkness of the sloping balcony. Tom gave the aisle his torch so his guest could see. On the screen below a woman's head was wavering, two or three times larger than life. A metallic voice clanged out, echoing sepulchrally all over the house, like a modern Delphic Oracle. 'Go back, go back!' she said. 'This is no place for you!'
Her big luminous eyes seemed to be looking right at Lew Stahl as she spoke. Her finger came out and pointed, and it seemed to aim straight at him and him alone. It was weird; he almost stopped in his tracks, then went on again. He hadn't eaten all day; he figured he must be woozy, to think things like that. ("Dusk To Dawn") — Cornell Woolrich

If they could keep out of jail for this short stretch, most would go on to be the spine of American society - fixing the cars, working the factories, growing the food and fighting the wars. — Bruce Springsteen