Maggie Stiefvater’s words are worth a thousand pictures

Anyone who’s even made it through the first few pages of Shiver knows that Maggie Stiefvater can create the most beautiful images with words. She uses them like a paintbrush on readers’ minds, reversing the cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words.

No doubt Linger will follow suit, but in the meantime, here are some of our  favorite quotes from Shiver. Did your favorite make the list?

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• “As the hours crept by, the afternoon sunlight bleached all the books on the shelves to pale, gilded versions of themselves and warmed the paper and ink inside the covers so that the smell of unread words hung in the air.”

 

• “You’re like a song that I heard when I was a little kid but forgot I knew until I heard it again.”

 

• “I’d found heaven and grabbed it as tightly as I could, but it was unraveling, an insubstantial thread sliding between my fingers, too fine to hold.”

 

• “He started to hum a song, and then, after a few bars, he sang it. Quietly, sort of half-sung, half-spoken, incredibly gentle. I didn’t catch all the words, but it was about his summer girl. Me. Maybe his forever girl. His yellow eyes were half-lidded as he sang, and in that golden moment, hanging taut in the middle of an ice-covered landscape like a single bubble of summer nectar, I could see how my life could be stretched out in front of me.”

 

• “The smell of summer on her skin, the half-recalled cadence of her voice, the sensation of her fingers on my fur. Every bit of me sang with the memory of her closeness.”

 

• “And then I opened my eyes and it was just Grace and me – nothing anywhere but Grace and me – she pressing her lips together as though she were keeping my kiss inside her, and me, holding this moment that was as fragile as a bird in my hands.”

 

• “My heart ached inside me, torn between wanting them to stop and wishing they would go on for ever. I imagined myself there among them in the golden woods, watching them tilt their heads back and howl underneath a sky of endless stars. I blinked a tear away, feeling foolish and miserable, but I didn’t go to sleep until every wolf had fallen silent.”

 

• “Some days seem to fit together like a stained glass window. A hundred little pieces of different color and mood that, when combined, create a complete picture.”

• “I felt him shuddering, shuddering against me as he buried his face in my hair.
  I said, uselessly, “Sam, don’t go.”
  Sam cupped my face in his hands and looked me in the eyes. His eyes were yellow, sad, wolf, mine. “These stay the same. Remember that when you look at me. Remember it’s me. Please.””

 

• “That night, like every other night since I’d met her, I curled Grace into my arms, listening to her parents’ muffled movements in the living room. They were like busy little brainless birds, fluttering in and out of their nest at all hours of the day or night, so involved in the pleasure of nest-building that they hadn’t noticed that it had been empty for years.”