William Gass's In the Heart of the Heart of the Country is something I could quote from for the rest of my life, I think.

I've it before, remember?

Nobody else writes or can write sentences/paragraphs like this.

Mrs. Desmond is my right-hand friend; she's eighty-five. A thin white mist of hair, fine and tangled, manifests the climate of her mind. She is habitually suspicious, fretful, nervous. Burglars break in at noon. Children trespass. Even now they are shaking the pear tree, stealing rhubarb, denting lawn. Flies caught in the screens and numbed by frost awake in the heat to buzz and scrape the metal cloth and frighten her, though she is deaf to me, and consequently cannot hear them. Boards creak, the wind whistles across the chimney mouths, drafts cruise like fish through the hallow rooms. It is herself she hears, her own flesh failing, for only death will preserve her from those daily chores she climbs like stairs, and all that anxious waiting. It is now, she wonders. No? Then: is it now?

We do not converse. She visits me to talk. My task to murmur. She talks about her grandsons, her daughter who lives in Delphi, her sister or her husband—both gone—obscure friends—dead—obscurer aunts and uncles—lost—ancient neighbors, members of her church or of her clubs—passed or passing on; and in this way she brings the ends of her life together with a terrifying rush: she is a girl, a wife, a mother, widow, all at once. All at once—appalling—but I believe it; I wince in expectation of the clap. Her talk's a fence—a shade drawn, a window fastened, door that's locked—for no one dies taking tea in a kitchen; and as her years compress and begin to jumble, I really believe in the brevity of life; I sweat in my wonder; death is the dog down the street, the angry gander, bedroom spider, goblin who's come to get her; and it occurs to me that in my listening posture I'm the boy who suffered the winds of my grandfather with an exactly similar politeness, that I am, right now, all my ages, out in elbows, as angular as badly stacked cards. Thus was I, when I love you, every man I could be, youth and child—from from enough—and you, strangely ambiguous a being, met me, heart for spade, play after play, the whole run of your suits.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

So consciously composed, these stories are naturally laden with idebtednesss, as though they have been to Hawaii, and encircled by exotic blooms. If my hero's hair is red as rust, to whom goes the credit—a recessive gene in my grandmother's unmentionable make-up? And all those authors I have lain with—loved—left—which ones are to blame for my page-long shopping lists, my vulgarized lingo, my tin pan prose? whose blood beats in the baby when none will claim paternity and the mother is unknown?" - William Gass, from the preface to In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.

If you haven't read In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, you should immediately. The preface is worth the price alone, especially if you have any interest in writing and the indifference that springs from it, about its futility but all-consuming importance. Its style and tone has been instructive—not that I've followed nearly everything he lays out—since I read it probably a decade ago and I mentally return to it overwhelmingly often (funny how that happens), at times when it's least expected.

The stories are also incredible. Dense, yet light. Playful and sad. And as near to perfect as you're likely to find. There should be more books like it.