Tove Jansson Quotes

I'm a dweller of the threshold and I'm waiting at the door, and I'm standing in the darkness, I don't want to wait no more.

It's a liminal thing, humming, And I'm always interested in liminal things.

My mother could never have said she loved fall, but as she walked down the steps with her suitcase in hand toward the red Monte Carlo her husband had been waiting in for nearly an hour, she could have said that she respected its place as a mediator between two extremes. Fall came and went, while winter was endured and summer was revered. Fall was the repose that made both possible and bearable, and now here she was was with her husband next to her, heading headlong into an early-fall afternoon with only the vaguest ideas of who they were becoming and what came next.

...the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were nowhere. It might be beautiful outside the window-and it was, she had sense enough to realize that-but it wasn't anywhere to her, just a scene passing by that was framed by the train window. (p160)

The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it.

Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge.

I feel like 'Harlem River' was me putting one foot out the door of New York, and 'Still Life' is between Point A and Point B. It's the grey area.

The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

It's interesting--the way in which one has to balance life--because you have to know when to let go and when to pull back.... There's always some liminal (as opposed to subliminal) space in between which is harder to inhabit because it never feels as safe as moving from one extreme to another.

It was the in-between time, before day leaves and night comes, a time I’ve never been partial to because of the sadness that lingers in the space between going and coming.

You need boundaries... Even in our material creations, boundaries mark the most beautiful of places, between the ocean and the shore, between the mountains and the plains, where the canyon meets the river.

I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know.

Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.

We move between two darknesses.

We stand on the threshold of a twilight-whether morning or evening we do not know. One is followed by the night, the other heralds the dawn.

Halfway down the stairs, is a stair, where I sit. There isn't any, other stair, quite like, it. I'm not at the bottom, I'm not at the top; So this is the stair, where, I always, stop. Halfway up the stairs, isn't up, and isn't down. It isn't in the nursery, it isn't in the town. And all sorts of funny thoughts, run round my head: It isn't really anywhere! It's somewhere else instead!

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

Fifteen. Sixteen was probably something, but fifteen - fifteen was a place between here and nowhere.

There is a place where the sidewalk ends.

My boat is on the shore, And my bark is on the sea.

I don't know when we'll see each other again or what the world will be like when we do. We may both have seen many horrible things. But I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.

...precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated.

We are always in the space in-between... all the spaces where you are not actually at home. You haven't arrived yet.... This is where our mind is the most open. We are alert, we are sensitive, and destiny can happen. We do not have any barriers and we are vulnerable. Vulnerability is important. It means we are completely alive and this is an extremely important space. This is for me the space from which my work generates.

Sometimes it seemed to me a cruelty that so much was unresolved between us; at other times, a blessing that a hope of reunion lingered.