Weekend Words: Stair
"History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below."
On Thursday, Ted Loos of The New York Times reported that a “$150 Million Stairway to Nowhere” has been proposed as supersized work of public art for the Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s Far West Side.
As I was walking up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish, I wish he’d stay away.
—Hughes Mearns, “The Psychoed”
Clandestine steps upon imagined stairs
Climb through the night, because his cuckoos call.
—Wallace Stevens, “Asides on the Oboe”
All rising to a great place is by a winding stair.
—Francis Bacon, “Of Great Place”
I came upstairs into the world; for I was born in a cellar.
—William Congreve, “Love for Love”
When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
You shall find out how salt is the taste of another man’s bread, and how hard is the way up another man’s stairs.
—Dante, Divine Comedy, Paradiso
Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear;
The wheels revolve, the universe keeps running.
(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)
—Sylvia Plath, “To Eva Descending the Stairs”
Time was away and somewhere else,
There were two glasses and two chairs
And two people with the one pulse
(Somebody stopped the moving stairs)
Time was away and somewhere else.
—Louis MacNiece, “Meeting Point”
I don’t have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They’re upstairs in my socks.
—Groucho Marx, from A Day at the Races
A man’s health can be judged by which he takes two at a time — pills or stairs.
—Joan Welsh
The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation’s pulse, you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs.
—E.B. White
History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below.
—Voltaire
Within a narrow span of duration and space the work of art concentrates a view of the human condition; and sometimes it marks the steps of progression, just as a man climbing the dark stairs of a medieval tower assures himself by the changing sights glimpsed through its narrow windows that he is getting somewhere after all.
—Rudolph Arnheim, Entropy and Art
I think I will be able to, in the end, rise above the clouds and climb the stairs to Heaven, and I will look down on my beautiful life.
—Yayoi Kusama
My soul can find no staircase to heaven unless it be through Earth’s loveliness.
—Michelangelo Buonarroti
Someone once said that to make a regular person laugh, you need to dress a guy up like an old lady and push him down the stairs. To make a comedy writer laugh, you have to push a real old lady down the stairs. I don’t know who that’s attributed to. I think it’s Aristophanes. Or Catherine the Great.
—Tina Fey
And find a poor devil has ended his cares
At the foot of your rotten-runged rat-riddled stairs?
Do I carry the moon in my pocket?
—Robert Browning, “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha”
