Quotes from Glen Hirshberg

Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it. It's the one thing in the job that will always be there, and the real pleasure in the profession. Everything else is luck.

So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.

Every time I fall in love with a book, I just feel grateful and thrilled to have it in my life.

Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it. It's the one thing in the job that will always be there, and the real pleasure in the profession. Everything else is luck.

The ghosts that exert the most power in people's lives-at least, the people I know–tend to be of their own making, and consist of equal parts regret and old fears and just plain missing somebody.

I'm a husband, a father of two, a full-time teacher, and so my writing process mostly involves sitting down and writing, any chance I get, anywhere I am, for as long as life will let me. Music helps. Good light helps. I love quiet and coffee when I can get them. But I can write on a bus, in a dentist office's waiting room, in bed with a clip-on booklight, almost anywhere. And I try to do at least some every single day.

Great work doesn't make me jealous; it makes me want to work.

The fever, I realized, had gone. Beneath my feet, the hardwood floor felt cool on my feet, the air gentle against my itching legs. This was just the world, after all. Big, thoroughly mapped place to sell joy or buy it, hunt company or flee it, trust yourself or your friends or your instincts, stretch the hours as much as you could, and one day vanish. ("Safety Clowns")

So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.

More than anything, Natalie wanted to move to the bed, take Sophie's hand, sit beside her.Lay her head against her shoulder. But she didn't dare. Or maybe just couldn't. Fear. Friendship. Desire. Regret. Remorse. Longing. Hunger. Terror. It was getting so hard to tell the difference between any of those things. If she'd ever been able to. If anyone really could.

Every single one of them with their eyes open and on him, their mouths, too, halfway screaming, halfway begging. Offering themselves to him, because the call was irresistible despite being recognizable. They were moths who know what the light is, know what it will do to them. And come anyway.

Every time I fall in love with a book, I just feel grateful and thrilled to have it in my life.

But I can't help thinking about the graves I saw on this summer's trip, and the millions of people in them, and the millions more without graves. The ones who are smoke. And I find that I can feel it, at last. Or that I've always felt it, without knowing what it was: the Holocaust, roaring down the generations like a wave of radiation, eradicating, in everyone it touches, the ability to trust people, experience joy; fall in love, believe in love when you see it in others. ("Dancing Men")

Every single one of them with their eyes open and on him, their mouths, too, halfway screaming, halfway begging. Offering themselves to him, because the call was irresistible despite being recognizable. They were moths who know what the to light is, know what it will do to them. And they come anyway.

Drifting on the black, rippling surface were fingers. Thumbs. Dozens of them. Hundreds, floating like dead fish in a dynamited pond. I saw part of an ear. The lights went out.

I'm on the whatever-gets-this-book-that-I'm-working-on-written track. I have really done it a lot of different ways, to be honest. I'm a full-time Dad, I've been a full-time teacher for some 20 years. Good Girls is book number seven. One of the things that has made it possible for me is I get up every day and I find a way to fit some writing in, no matter what.

I've never understood the logic that says a work doesn't need to be judged on the quality of its writing or characters simply because its genre. On the other hand, I've also never understood the logic of excusing a work from the need to tell a story worth telling about people worth knowing simply because the author writes pretty language or has some insights to offer.

Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it.