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# Weekend Words: Stair
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-stair/
- Published: 2016-09-18T13:30:24.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:28:48.000Z
- Description: "History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below."
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:17 (2016, 2017, part 1)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2016/09/stair.jpg)

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, “Old Man in an Interior with Winding Staircase” (1632), oil on panel, 29 x 33 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris (image via Web Gallery of Art)

On Thursday, Ted Loos of *The New York Times* [reported ](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/arts/design/hudson-yards-own-social-climbing-stairway.html?%5Fr=0&ref=hyperallergic.com)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”**