Sculptor's Daughter

Art and life, light and dark, child’s play and deadly seriousness, hilarity and despair, creativity and existential cataclysm, and all of these oppositions held simultaneously and brought to work together: this is Tove Jansson territory.

THE SMALLER YOU ARE, the bigger Christmas is

mean, anyone can let Danger out but the really clever thing is finding somewhere for it to go afterwards

I got fed up with her because she wasn’t happy. I don’t like it when people find life difficult. It gives me a bad conscience and then I get angry and begin to feel that they might as well go somewhere else

You can close your mind to things if something is important enough. It works very well. You make yourself very small, shut your eyes tight and say a big word over and

I love her picture. It goes deep into the wall, deeper than my hole, deeper than Poyu’s drawing-room, it goes on endlessly and one never gets to the place where the sun is setting but the red gets more and more intense. I’m sure it’s burning

One Sunday I taught Poyu how to escape from the snakes in their big carpet. All you have to do is walk along the light-coloured edges, on all the colours that are light. If you step on the dark colours next to them you are lost. There are such swarms of snakes there you just can’t describe them, you have to imagine them. Everyone must imagine his own snakes because no one else’s snakes can ever be as awful