The Listeners Quotes

“He looked at the side of her face, at her pensive mouth, her clever eyes. He couldn’t bear it anymore. “June, what am I to you?
The breeze made her flutter her eyelashes low. “What do you want to be to me?”
“Everything,” he replied. “I want to be what makes you smile when we come home to each other and I want to be what makes you settle under a full moon and I want to be what makes you wild when I’m gone and I want to be what makes you laugh when I’m inside you and I want to be what makes you weep when I die and I want to be everything else in between and I want to take you out into the world and see it with you, but if it has to be here, then here is where I land.”
Words rarely came easily to Tucker, but they didn’t stop coming then, breaking through the surface until there were no more left. He wanted her to know. He wanted every part of her to know, in a thorough way, in a way that left no room for doubt.
June whispered, “Then that’s what you should be to me.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“She wanted, she wanted, she wanted, would it ever stop, this wanting, this never getting, this never-shrinking chasm between need and reality.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“June had long ago discovered that most people were bad listeners; they thought listening was synonymous with hearing. But the spoken was only half a conversation. True needs, wants, fears, and hopes hid not in the words that were said, but in the ones that weren’t, and all these formed the core of luxury. June had become a good listener.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“As they walked, June found she could not remember the last time she had spent this many minutes on so little. A stroll through a place that could serve her no good in the future. Nor could she recall the last time she’d spent so much time with someone who required so little from her. Tucker’s silence didn’t demand her to fill it. His unhappiness, if he had any, was not currently her task to solve. She knew he would have made this walk on his own, just as she would have, but she also knew he preferred it with the wordless company. She was free to simply be herself; he was free to simply be himself, alongside each other.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“Wealth is just security. Luxury is living carefree.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“Water wasn’t just one thing; it could be rain, snow, ice, and rivers.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“She hadn’t moved an inch, and she missed it here already.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“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.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“When June looked back at herself, she remembered a blank person, an empty mirror. Other children loudly explored the world to discover who they wanted to be, but June had been silent and featureless as the surface of a mountain lake. She just listened.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“Even he, with all his life experience and his training, saw loveliness in these surroundings. Everything logical in him was unnerved; everything else swooned.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“ Just because something isn’t beautiful doesn’t make it ugly. The necessary is very rarely beautiful.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“It was a difficult journey to picture unless you’d taken it yourself. For many years, June had thought she was the woman she was despite who she’d been as a child. Now she knew she was the woman she was because of who she’d been as a child. Only a person who understood nothing about others had the patience to so thoroughly study them.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“he wanted to put her words in his mouth.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“We are living an international incident.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“You smell like purgatory and look like hell.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“obvious attraction can add appeal to an unusual visage, too.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“Every interaction has a social cost, Mr. Francis had said. But what if some didn’t?”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“Do Not Disturb, by Frank Case”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“potage mongole”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“Architecturally, the hotel’s form didn’t make sense, but if one thought of it as a living entity—?”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“There really is nothing more valuable than a great poet and more useless than a bad one.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“Everything,” he replied. “I want to be what makes you smile when we come home to each other and I want to be what makes you settle under a full moon and I want to be what makes you wild when I’m gone and I want to be what makes you laugh when I’m inside you and I want to be what makes you weep when I die and I want to be everything else in between and I want to take you out into the world and see it with you, but if it has to be here, then here”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“This was what money had done to the Gilfoyle siblings; gave them the freedom to be soft, to be carefree, to be messy. They did not need to hustle or to charm.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“he couldn’t forget how pain and humor were so tightly aligned that, in a moment of mortal revelation, they were indistinguishable.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“No,” June said. “I belong to the Avallon.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“The Avallon simply couldn’t run without this division between identity and soul.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“but her expression was somehow uncivilized.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“Hannelore smiled, less because she was amused than because she knew she was supposed to be amused.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“A very great soldier would do all this, but also realize the terrible game of war was always changing, and would spend his time innovating, not simply surviving.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners

“The two Morgan sons (who reminded June, poignantly, of Sandy) pet the dachshunds and shyly hugged June, an outlandish display of affection only possible because they had been much younger when she’d met them. This reticence was the mark of the upper class; Mr. Francis had tried to teach her. This is the language of the lower class: immediacy, possession, lust, hunger, the obvious. This is the language of the ruling class: legacy, humor, artifice, generosity, subtlety. If you want someone to treat you above your station, most of what you want must remain unspoken. To say the thing is to prove your crassness. You are not crass, June Hudson. I am not crass, Mr. Francis. You are meant for great things, June Hudson. You can say that, I can’t; them are the rules, right? Ha. Those are the rules, June.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners