The Listeners

by Maggie Stiefvater

This was the nature of the average Avallon guest: people so high on the social ladder they had to duck for the sun to go overhead.

Wealth is just security. Luxury is living carefree.

making slow, dreamy loops through papery clouds.

everyone knew the rumors about the fourth floor; this was supernatural malice at work.

Everything that made the landscape beautiful—the remote location, the steeply pitched slopes, the rushing rapids—was dangerous.

“Ah, it’s all right, it’s just a hotel.” “If it was only that,” Tucker replied, “we wouldn’t be here.”

She was somewhat unconventionally dressed—slacks, wool jacket, short hair slicked back darkly—and she was followed by three dachshunds who, when she twitched a finger, sat themselves against the wall, as obedient as the staff.

She went alone, just as she had in the elevator earlier, not because the kitchen was haunted, but because the chef was.

In her younger days, she used to imagine that the sweetwater housed person-shaped entities. Mermaids. Nymphs.

It was difficult to tell which of these were her thoughts and which belonged to the entities in the water; they were shaped exactly the same.

When you believed in one intangible thing, why not a second, why not a third.

The attack had been both audacious and successful, two concepts Americans had come to believe they had ownership of.

What June believed and what needed to be done were not always the same thing. What she wanted and what the hotel needed were not always the same thing. Who she was and who she had to be were not always the same thing. Every day she drank four glasses of that dissonance and swallowed it.

Schaumschläger, that’s what we call it when someone is filling pages with meaningless information.

how pain and humor were so tightly aligned

She had been happy yesterday, but she would not be happy tomorrow. Or tomorrow. Or tomorrow. The version of her who grinned was in the past.

(Why do you say “unbeautiful” instead of “ugly”? Just because something isn’t beautiful doesn’t make it ugly. The necessary is very rarely beautiful.)

boredom, like many maladies, generally only afflicted the young and the weak.

chaotic joy

This world forged them with their armor on the inside, and if trauma tugged that skeleton free from their skin, they no longer had the structural integrity to stand.