The Painted Bird

by Jerzy Kosiński

Unlike politics, which offered only extravagant promises of a Utopian future, I knew fiction could present lives as they are truly lived.

For justice hangs over the world like a great sledgehammer lifted by a powerful arm, which has to stop for a while before coming down with terrible force on the unsuspecting anvil.

The Germans puzzled me. What a waste. Was such a destitute, cruel world worth ruling?

He now carried the cage in himself; it bound his brain and heart and paralyzed his muscles. Freedom, which had set him apart from other resigned, drowsy rabbits, left him like the wind-driven fragrance evaporating from crushed, dried clover.