Just picked this up the other day. I love the Harcourt Brace cover:

And this is on my "to read" list, having come highly recommended from someone:

"That child who died in the war is also the secret of each one who found him at the top of that tall tree, crucified on that tree by the carcass of his airplane.

One cannot write about that. Or else one can write about everything. To write about everything, everything at once, is not writing. It's nothing. To read it is untenable, like reading an advertisement."

- Marguerite Duras, "The Death of the Young British Pilot," Writing - p. 67

"I was humming hit tunes in the backseat watching the roadside go by as dreamily as it was watching me when I heard from my father half an inarticulate outcry and my head was slammed into the watching window. Almost immediately all of me was jerked back as though Martha was yanking one of the kids from the edge of an embankment, only now I was to be thrown onto the pile of elderberries we had wrapped in funnels of newspaper or stuffed in grocery sacks. As I rebounded from the floor of the car my ears received, like the rapid rasp of a saw, a series of terrible sounds: of rending metals, shattering glass, pissing vapors, unstaged screams. Actually, hearing scarcely intervened. They were palpable things, these noises, there like the rear window, rear seat, scissors, bags of berries. Through that window, back on the highway we had so abruptly fled, I saw two automobiles still shuddering from the force of their collision. Gray white steam rose chaotically. Glass began to patter upon the roof of our Chevrolet where we were stopped upon the shoulder. Then, almost slowly, eight door fell off or opened and people fell or otherwise came out of them, some hugging themselves and rolling over on the highway or down the bank beside it near where we were. A fragment of white arm appeared in the steam. I stared. Staring was all I was. How quickly—inexplicably—my peaceful window had been entered by this other. A woman asmear with blood stood up, fell softly down, stood slowly up again, wavering like a little flag. The car which had been in line behind us was new and shiny. I had noticed it because it had followed us awhile, unable to pass and impatient because of the traffic. The car which had struck was a heap of rust, and now weakened fenders and body panels were broken and scattered. Both hoods had risen in the air to allow the engines to rush at one another. One man had hopped away from the wreck on his unshattered leg and hugged a tree. Water appeared to be running down the leg of a lady who'd got no farther than the running board. The dust still rose in rivulets, making the air seem to shake as if it were a pane of glass in the process, like the sky, of coming to pieces. My god, we've got to get out of here, my father said. Then I also smelled the gasoline. People began to come from other cars with coats and their own anguish. They appeared to be oblivious of the gasoline. I didn't utter a word—not one. What I saw entered me like a spear." 

- William H. Gass, The Tunnel - p. 232

"Walking along the edge of the river, I no longer saw those lovely pale leaves pass me like petals, as if some river flower were blooming oddly out of season (poetry appearing abruptly in my social prose); rather I took them to be elements of a threatening metaphor, because I had suddenly seen that the world was held together only by frost and by freezing, by contraction, that its bowels contained huge compressors and ice-cold molds; so the place where I stood looking over a trivial Indiana landscape—snow freshly falling upon an otherwise turgid, uninteresting stream—was actually a point on the hazardous brink of Being. Consequently there appeared before me an emblem of all that was—all that was like a frozen fog—exhaust from the engines of entropy; and I saw in the whitened leaves floating by me an honesty normally missing from Nature's speech, because this adventitious coating threw open the heart of the Law: this scene of desolation—relieved only by the barren purity of trees—this wedge was all there was; and then I understood that the soft lull of August water was but a blanket on a snowbank; the dust that a wave of wind would raise was merely the ash of a dry summer blizzard; the daffodils which would ring our Chinese elm were blooming spikes of ice, encased in green like a thug's gloves; there was just one season; and when the cottonwoods released their seeds, I would see smoke from the soul of the cold cross the river on the wind to snag in the hawthorns and perish in their grip like every love"

- William H. Gass, The Tunnel - p. 343