The Listeners

by Maggie Stiefvater

Kindness was a virtue, but in evil places, empathy punished the wearer.

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.

The Avallon had never been for those who deserved it. The Avallon had to present itself the same to everyone who came, or the entire illusion collapsed.

To have achieved notability but not be asked to perform it: that was a kind of luxury, too.

The hotel wasn’t for those who deserved it. It was for those who came. The moment that illusion was broken, so, too, was the staff.

Good manners, said Mr. Francis in June’s head, are about making the world a more beautiful place. Sometimes that means you have an unbeautiful thought, but you don’t say it. Sometimes it means you have an unbeautiful need, but you don’t ask for it. The moment it leaves your head, it makes the world less beautiful, do you understand? The well-mannered will go to all kinds of trouble to make sure their unbeautiful thoughts are well hidden. They train in this skill for their entire lives.

Just because something isn’t beautiful doesn’t make it ugly. The necessary is very rarely beautiful.)

she knew that overcoming adversity successfully wasn’t the same as being unaffected by it.

All these years, she had thought she was content, but now she realized she had been complacent, which was not the same at all. And now that she had felt the difference, she could not remember how long it had been since she had been happy.

People treated you as you asked them to, she had said, and clothing was the first demand you made of them.

A German general really did cut a deal with the State Department to save his son’s life—his son went on to live a long, productive life in America, his mental diagnosis turning out to be a misdiagnosis after all. A journalist really did leap out a window in an attempt to keep from returning to Germany—one of many foreign nationals captured in the State Department’s broad net. The FBI really did facilitate hasty weddings in between their grueling, endless hours of surveillance. The Japanese really did request the dining room be arranged like the Rising Sun—and they really did despise the German legation so much that they had to be separated.

an Italian diplomat setting fire to secret documents in his shoe

For the diplomats: Axis Diplomats in American Custody: The Housing of Enemy Representatives and Their Exchange for American Counterparts, 1941–1945, by Landon Alfriend Dunn and Timothy J. Ryan And more accessibly: Such Splendid Prisons: Diplomatic Detainment in America During World War II, by Harvey Solomon A fun hotel memoir: Do Not Disturb, by Frank Case

On the FBI: FBI Man: A Personal History, by Louis Cochran The internees’ perspective: Bridge to the Sun: A Memoir of Love and War, by Gwen Terasaki And, finally, oral histories of the home front: Americans Remember the Home Front: An Oral Narrative of the World War II Years in America, by Roy Hoopes