Richard Shindell works impressive alchemy with the plainest, most primal American pop melodies.

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

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

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.

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.

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")

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

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.

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

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")