Stella Duffy is a writer who never lets you down.

Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.

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

We all know our dates of birth but . . . every year there is another date that we pass over without knowing what it is but it is just as important it is the other date the death date.

Outside the leaves on the trees constricted slightly; they were the deep done green of the beginning of autumn. It was a Sunday in September. There would only be four. The clouds were high and the swallows would be here for another month or so before they left for the south before they returned again next summer.

Then I saw her smile so close to my eye that there was nothing to see but the smile and the thought came into my head that I’d never been inside a smile before. Who’d have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once

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.