staircases QUOTES

1 " You need mountains, long staircases don't make good hikers. "

2 " Brick walls towered over her. Decrepit staircases crowded about her. Nothing had changed. The line there, the lessons there, the rape there. Shouldn't the place be crimson with blood and black with shame? "

― Sarah Sundin , A Memory Between Us (Wings of Glory, #2)

3 " This is a world where things move at their own pace, including a tiny lift Fortey and I shared with a scholarly looking elderly man with whom Fortey chatted genially and familiarly as we proceeded upwards at about the rate that sediments are laid down.When the man departed, Fortey said to me: " That was a very nice chap named Norman who's spent forty-two years studying one species of plant, St. John's wort. He retired in 1989, but he still comes in every week." " How do you spend forty-two years on one species of plant?" I asked." It's remarkable, isn't it?" Fortey agreed. He thought for a moment. " He's very thorough apparently." The lift door opened to reveal a bricked over opening. Fortey looked confounded. " That's very strange," he said. " That used to be Botany back there." He punched a button for another floor, and we found our way at length to Botany by means of back staircases and discreet trespass through yet more departments where investigators toiled lovingly over once-living objects. "

4 " They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs. "

― Susan Hill

5 " He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases led down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles that led through invisible walls to other regions of space and time, and of hideous exchanges of personality that permitted explorations in remote and forbidden places, on other worlds, and in different space-time continua. "

― H.P. Lovecraft , The Thing on the Doorstep

6 " I thought I appreciated books, but this was an alter to the book gods. It was hard not to be impressed. I didn't know what had the most impact: the rosewood shelving, the rolling library ladders, the mezzanine floor with the ornate spiral wrought-iron staircases at each end, the carved moldings, the scent of well-loved books, or the silky Aubusson rugs in a soft faded palette of rose, sage and aqua. "

7 " The silhouettes of Lovat now dominated the skyline. Nine levels stretching skyward. Five hundred meters high at its apex. Each level housing buildings of various sizes sagged on the backs of buildings below. Thousands of sodium lamps twinkled in their recesses.

Lovat was the oldest and largest city on the coast, and it showed its age by the haphazard mess it had become. Roads rose and dipped, elevators and staircases criss-crossed, and floors would end and then begin across the city leaving large empty spaces between levels. "

― K.M. Alexander , The Stars Were Right (The Bell Forging Cycle #1)

8 " There's no escalators - there's only staircases to success. There is no substitute for hard work. "