Thomas Teal, a luminous translator of Jansson's twin talent for surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language, and someone who knows exactly how to convey her gift for sensing the meaning embedded in the most mundane act or turn of phrase.

I want to be bored. But I can't. But I really don't want to be this thing that I'm having to be instead of being bored.

I had a job, I got ill, I left the job to get better, and while I was getting better, I wrote some stories. I sent them to some publishers and the fifth one who replied said they'd take them. Then they went bankrupt. Then that bankrupt publisher got bought by a bigger firm. Story: in the end is the beginning, and in the beginning is the end.

It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.

We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once.

There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look.

I don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'