Tove Jansson Quotes

When you're on a boat, it is this tiny little island where you have to be completely self-sufficient.

Most people, it seems, think that Robinson Crusoe when he landed on his Island had nothing to keep him from starvation or anything else. As a matter of fact he had twelve raft loads of supplies that he took off the wrecked ship. He had as much food and furniture as if he had had a delicatessen store and Fifth Avenue outside his hut.

They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never dissapointed.

Loneliness is caused by an alienation from life. It is a loneliness from your real self.

They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.

She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there--like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.

And yet I understood the alienation of being around others who couldn't really see you or chose not to. I'd felt the self-loathing that came with being a fraud, protraying an image of what you wished you could be but weren't. I'd lived with the fear that people you loved might turn away from you if they ever got to know the true person hidden inside.

And a rock feels no pain; And an island never cries.

I foresaw my life unfolding as an interminable stretch of nothingness and so I spent my years on Tinos floundering, feeling like a stand-in for myself, a proxy, as though my real self resided elsewhere, waiting to unite someday with this dimmer, more hollow self. I felt marooned. An exile in my own home

My self is all to me. I don't have any need of you.

Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind.

I, measuring his affections by my own, Which then most sought where most might not be found, Being one too many by my weary self, Pursued my humor not pursuing his, And gladly shunned who gladly fled from me.

Generally, I like all islands. There, it is easier to rule.

Independence, like honor, is a rocky island, without a beach.

I have my books And my poetry to protect me; I am shielded in my armor, Hiding in my room, safe within my womb. I touch no one and no one touches me. I am a rock, I am an island.

An island always pleases my imagination, even the smallest, as a small continent and integral portion of the globe. I have a fancyfor building my hut on one. Even a bare, grassy isle, which I can see entirely over at a glance, has some undefined and mysterious charm for me.

Each one is all in all to himself; for being dead, all is dead to him.

I have a cartoon where the guy is pretty much, he's a regular-sized guy, but he's the size of the island. He's saying no man is an island, but I come pretty damn close.

The quality of owning freezes you forever in "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we.

Not only England, but every Englishman is an island.

Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.

The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches.

The whole dear notion of one's own Self-marvelous old free-willed, free- enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self- is a myth.

Let him who cannot be alone beware of community... Let him who is not in community beware of being alone... Each by itself has profound perils and pitfalls. One who wants fellowship without solitude plunges into the void of words and feelings, and the one who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self-infatuation and despair.