Tove Jansson Quotes

some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.

It's so easy to get caught up in this weird life. This isn't normal and I'm not singing for people that live my life. I'm singing to the life I used to have. The life I want to have again.

I feel my heart ache, but I've forgotten what that feeling means.

I can only guess that it made the world he went back to...strangely without meaning. Though he lived in it, though he even enjoyed it, it remained utterly remote. I think it had lost sense for him. In his heart was the reflection of a lovely dream that he could never quite recall.

To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again.

It gave me a strange feeling, and the rest of that night I didn’t say much, but merely sat there and drank, trying to decide if I was getting older and wiser, or just plain old.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

I exist only in the past.

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

Going home is not necessarily a wonderful experience. It always comes with a sense of loss and makes you so conscious of the inexorable passage of time.

The novel is like a melancholy form. It's about some kind of disillusionment with the way things are versus the idea of how they could be or how they used to be.

I get really homesick inside.

He had thrown himself away, he had lost interest in everything, and life, falling in with his feelings, had demanded nothing of him. He had lived as an outsider, an idler and onlooker, well liked in his young manhood, alone in his illness and advancing years. Seized with weariness, he sat down on the wall, and the river murmured darkly in his thoughts.

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more

Beneath the stains of time the feeling disappears, you are someone else I am still right here.

Or hast thou known the world so long in vain?

Everybody that went away suffered a broken heart. "I'm coming back some day," they all wrote. But never did. The old life was too small to fit anymore.

I wondered how long it could last. Maybe someday, years from now.If the pain would decrease to the point where I could bear it.I would be able to look back on those few short months that would always be the best of my life.

When I am sad and wearyWhen I think all hope has goneWhen I walk along High HolbornI think of you with nothing on

I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.

For as long as he could remember, he’d suffered from a vague nagging feeling of being not all there.

Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast

There was a desperate undercurrent to our marriage--a feeling of being in a dream from which I couldn't seem to awaken. A nagging sense that my life, laid out so neatly like the clothes Deirdre left on my divan, was no longer my own.

She wasn't mine. She hadn't been mine for a long time. She shouldn't be here and I shouldn't have asked. So instead of reassuring her, I kept leaning agains the tree looking like the devil and hoping she turned and ran. ~ The Vincent Boys