You can't understand what a free city means, because you're growing up in slavery.

To tell the truth, a star falling from the sky made about as much impression on me as a button falling off a coat.

They're like people, stones are: they're young or old, hard or soft, polished or rough, sharp, punk and covered with pores, striated with veins, sly or dependable enough to hold your foot when you slip, faithless, glad at your misfortunes, faithful, remaining on duty in foundations for centuries, dull-witted, morose, proud, dreaming of becoming epitaphs, modest, devoted without hope of recompense lined up on the ground in endless cobblestone rows like nameless people, nameless to the end of time.

In these times of turmoil we must try to love one another. Love will protect us.

All former inmates are hereby called upon to return to serve out their sentences.

At night, when everyone was sleeping as God had ordained, the statue would be out there standing erect. Day and night, summer and winter, it would stand. People laughed and cried, gave orders, died. But not the statue. It just stood there, mute. And everyone knew how suspicious silence was.

I was looking up at the sloping roofs trying to understand how love could fall on someone's head. Where was it? How did it stay up until it fell? It caused no bleeding and didn't even leave a lump, the way even the smallest stone would, so why did people complain about it so much, especially when it fell on girls?

Here ended the raindrops' life of joy and freedom. In the dark and hollow cistern they would recall with dreary sorrow the great spaces of sky they would never see again, the strange cities below them, and the lightning- ripped horizons.

I went back up the two flights to the living room, looked out and saw with joy that far off, at a distance too great to measure, a rainbow had appeared, like a peace treaty between mountain, river, bridge, torrents, road, wind, and city. But it was easy to see that it would be no more than a short truce.