“Early one morning in Moominvalley Snufkin woke up in his tent with the feeling that autumn had come and that it was time to break camp.
 Breaking camp in this way always comes with a hop, skip and a jump! All of a sudden everything is different, and if you’re going to move on you’re careful to make use of every single minute, you pull up your tent pegs and douse the fire quickly before anyone can stop you or start asking questions, you start running, pulling on your rucksack as you go, and finally you’re on your way and suddenly quite calm, like a solitary tree with every single leaf completely still.Your camping-site is an empty rectangle of bleached grass. Late in the morning your friends wake and say: he’s gone away, autumn’s coming.”

 “The quiet transition from autumn to winter is not a bad time at all. It’s a time for protecting and securing things and for making sure you’ve got in as many supplies as you can. It’s nice to gather together everything you possess as close to you as possible, to store up your warmth and your thoughts and burrow yourself into a deep hole inside, a core of safety where you can defend what is important and precious and your very own. Then the cold and the storms and the darkness can do their worst. They can grope their way up the walls looking for a way in, but they won’t find one, everything is shut, and you sit inside, laughing in your warmth and your solitude, for you have had foresight.
 There are those who stay at home and those who go away, and it has always been so. Everyone can choose for himself, but he must choose while there is still time and never change his mind.”

 “Snufkin padded along calmly, the forest closed around him and it began to rain. The rain fell on his green hat and on his raincoat, which was also green, it pittered and pattered everywhere and the forest wrapped him in a gentle and exquisite loneliness.”

 “The very last house stood all by itself under a dark green wall of fir-trees, and here the wild country really began. Snufkin walked faster and faster straight into the forest. Then the door of the last house opened a chink and a very old voice cried, “Where are you off to?”
“I don’t know,” Snufkin replied. The door shut again and Snufkin entered his forest, with a hundred miles of silence ahead of him.”

 Tove Jansson. Moominvalley in November, 1970