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

Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.

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 went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.

remember you must live. remember you most love. remainder you mist leaf.

The head has its confines. The head’s got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons.

What shop did this book come from? she asked. Her father was looking worried at the cooker. He always got rice wrong. I don't know, Brooksie, he said, I don't remember. That was unimaginable, not remembering where a book has come from! and where it was bought from! That was part of the whole history, the whole point, of any book that you owned! And when you picked it up later in the house at home, you knew, you just knew by looking and having it in your hand, where it came from and where you got it and when and why you'd decided to buy it.