“The hotel was called the Alta Loma. It was built on a hillside in reverse, there on the crest of Bunker Hill, built against the decline of the hill, so that the main floor was on the level with the street but the tenth floor was downstairs ten levels. If you had room 862, you got in the elevator and went down eight floors, and if you wanted to go down in the truck room, you didn't go down but up to the attic, one floor above the main floor.”

Source: Ask the Dust (1939), Chapter One

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John Fante113

1909–1983; American novelist, short story writer and screen… 1909–1983

Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) American stand-up comedian

Mitch All Together (2003)

“You look at the floor and see the floor. I look at the floor and see molecules.”

Dan Aykroyd (1952) Canadian film actor

As quoted by [Agony and Excesses of Stardom, Doug, Hill, Jeff, Weingrad, San Francisco Chronicle, March 4, 1986, 16]

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.”

Richard Siken (1967) American poet

“Truscott (shouting, knocking Hal to the floor): Under any other political system I'd have you on the floor in tears!
Hal (crying): You've got me on the floor in tears!”

Joe Orton (1933–1967) English playwright and author

Loot (1965), Act I

“But if in vain, down on the stubborn floor
Of Earth, and up to Heav'n's unopening Door
You gaze To-day, while You are You — how then
To-morrow, You when shall be You no more?”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

The Rubaiyat (1120)

“Are you sure that a floor cannot also be a ceiling? Are you absolutely certain that you go up when you walk up a staircase?”

M. C. Escher (1898–1972) Dutch graphic artist

Variant translations: Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?
I can't keep from fooling around with our irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure knowingly to mix up two and three dimensionalities, flat and spatial, and to make fun of gravity.
1950's, On Being a Graphic Artist', 1953
Context: In my prints I try to show that we live in a beautiful and orderly world and not in a chaos without norms, as we sometimes seem to. My subjects are also often playful. I cannot help mocking all our unwavering certainties. It is, for example, great fun deliberately to confuse two and three dimensions, the plane and space, or to poke fun at gravity. Are you sure that a floor cannot also be a ceiling? Are you absolutely certain that you go up when you walk up a staircase? Can you be definite that it is impossible to eat your cake and have it?

““You are settling in?” he said. “Your rooms are sufficient; the fire is lit, the floors swept; all ets are ceteraed?””

Tina Connolly American writer

Source: Ironskin (2012), Chapter 3, “Sequins and Bluepacks” (p. 43)