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 was at the tail end of the family. The next brother along was already seven years older than me. I remember growing up by myself, playing games by myself.

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

Tonight I can smell the season the way it's usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you're used to it, when you've forgotten its smell, then there it is back in the air and the flow of things shifting and resettling again.

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.

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

There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.