This is one of the best short story collections I have read in a long while. "It seemed that he and Joan were caught together in a classroom where they would never be recognized, or in a charade that would never be guessed, the correct answer being Two Silver Birches in a Meadow.""All my life people have been expecting me to faint. I have no idea why. I never faint.""Spring infiltrates a city through the blood of its inhabitants.""He felt as if he were leaning backward, and his mind seemed a kind of twig, a twig that had deviated from the trunk and chosen to be this branch instead of that one, and chosen again and again, becoming finer with each choice until there was nothing left for it but to vanish into air." "If I had any dignity I'd be dead or insane.""I remember how I used to read a newspaper and care and it seems like another person.""I'm really all right, except right now. My fundamental impression I think is of the incredible wastefulness of being alive.""He escorted a squat powdered woman who looked as though she had put on her lipstick by eating it.""and the existence of languages other than English, the existence of so many, each so vast, intricate, and opaque, seemed to prove cosmic dementia.""While of course great caution should attend assertions about evidence so tenuous, so disjointed, and so befouled with the mud of phlegm and fatigue, each fragment seems hollow in the same way; and a kind of shape, or at least a tendency of motion which if we could imagine it continuing uninterrupted would produce a shape, might by hypothesized. But we will be on firmer ground simply describing ther surface layers of days.""Care is crucial; days, though in sum their supply of rubbish seems endless, are each an ingument of ghostly thinness.""There was a light above him he could not rise out of the surrounding confusion."
