Hanno D. Șandor

“And if you drink anymore, I’m going to have to carry you to the cab.”

“You’ll do that?”

“Fuck, no! Switch to Coke!”
― Sean Kennedy, Tigers and Devils

“I believe that all children should be surrounded by books and animals.”
― Gerald Durrell

“Instead there was a rush on me of people having to have immediate action; some hand-hacked old kitchen stiff as thickened with grease as a miner or sandhog would be with clay, wanting me to go and see his boss, subito; or an Indian would bring his grievances written in a poem on a paper bag soaked with doughnut oil.[….] There were Greek and Negro chambermaids from all the hotels, porters, doormen, checkroom attendants, waitresses, specialists [….]. All kinds were coming. The humanity of the under-galleries of pipes, storage, and coal made an appearance, maintenance men, short-order grovelers; or a ducal Frenchman, in homburg, like a singer, calling himself “the beauty cook,” who wrote down on his card without taking off his gloves. And then old snowbirds and white hound-looking faces, guys with Wobbly cards from an earlier time, old Bohunk women with letters explaining what was wanted, and all varieties of assaulted kissers, infirmity, drunkenness, dazedness, innocence, limping, crawling, insanity, prejudice, and from downright leprosy the whole way again to the most vigorous straight- backed beauty. So if this collection of people has nothing in common with what would have brought up the back of a Xerxes’ army or a Constantine’s, new things have been formed; but what struck me in them was a feeling of antiquity and thick crust. But I expect happiness and gladness have always been the same, so how much variation should there be in their opposite? Dealing with them, signing them into the organization and explaining what to expect, wasn’t all generous kindness. In large part it was rough, when I wanted to get out of the way. The demand was that fierce, the idea having gotten around that it was a judgment hour, that they wanted to pull you from your clerical side of the desk to go with them.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

“Even in the dry heat of summer's end, the great forest was never silent. Along the ground – soft, bare soil, twigs and fallen branches, decaying leaves black as ashes – there ran a continuous flow of sound. As a fire burns with a murmur of flames, with the intermittent crack of exploding knots în the logs and the falling and settling of coal, so on the forest floor the hours of dusky light consumed away with rustlings, patterings, sighing and dying of breeze, scuttlings of rodents, snakes, lizards and now and then the padding of some larger animal on the move. Above, the green dusk of creepers and branches formed another realm, inhabited by the monkeys and sloths, by hunting spiders and birds innumerable -creatures passing all their lives high above the ground. Here the noises were louder and harsher –chatterings, sudden cacklings and screams, hollow knockings, bell-like calls and the swish of disturbed leaves and branches. Higher still, in the topmost tiers, where the sunlight fell upon the outer surface of the forest as upon the upper side of an expanse of green clouds, the raucous gloom gave place to a silent brightness, the province of great butterflies flitting across the sprays in a solitude where no eye admired nor any ear caught the minute sounds made by those marvellous wings.”
― Richard Adams