I'm reading Tove Jansson's Moomin books to my kids at bedtime at the moment. The otherworldliness and thoughtful, gentle humanism is such a welcome balm. Here are some snippets from "Moominland Midwinter", which is like a meditation on managing loneliness...

A bit of Too-tacky wisdom:
"All things are so very uncertain, and that's exactly what makes me feel reassured."

"'The sun's coming back again,' Moomintroll thought in great excitement. 'No darkness, no loneliness any more. Once again I'll sit in the sun on the verandah and feel my back warming...'"

"In the evening he took the lamp there with him and lay for a while listening to his ancestor's rustling in the chimney.
'Perhaps I lived like this a thousand years ago,' Moomintroll thought happily."

"The guests loved their long, somewhat slovenly forenoons, when the new day was allowed to break later, while everybody discussed the dreams of the night and listened to Moomintroll making coffee in the kitchen.
The Hemulen [Joe Wicks!] interrupted all that..."

"Suddenly it was as if a great door had blown wide open, the darkness yawned, and everything was filled with wet, flying snow....
this was the very moment when the long spring was born."

The little dog, Sorry-Oo, realises he's made a mistake, wanting to join the wolves in the forest:
"What a pity. I could have slept all these nights instead of sitting here and longing myself silly..."

Too-tacky turns her cap to the blue side when she feels spring's arrived, and sings
"I am Too-ticky
And my cap's turned inside out
I am Too-ticky
Catching warm winds in my nose!
...The great earth revolves
And everything is changed these days
Including people's winter woollens."

"Now came spring, but not at all as he had imagined its coming. He had thought that it would deliver him from a strange and hostile world, but now it was simply a continuation of his new experiences, of something he had already conquered and made his own."

"'Is it you?' cried Moomintroll. 'Is it really you? Who met the Lady of the Cold?'
'I don't remember,' said the squirrel... and skipped off between the trees.
'I'll have to look into this later,' thought Moomintroll."
[Those who know will shed a tear, here].

Moominmamma wakes from hibernation - Moomintroll worries that she'll be cross about all the mess...
"'Nobody's washed the dishes,' Moomintroll cried wretchedly.
'Oh, of course not,' said Moominmamma. 'Everything's going to be all right.'"

"This day the spring had decided not to be poetical but simply cheerful. It had spread flocks of small scatterbrained clouds in the sky, it swept down the last specks of snow from every roof, it made new little brooks run everywhere and was playing at April the best it could."

"Then he seated himself on the bathing house steps, with the spring sea at his feet...
Moomintroll looked down in the water and tried to remember the time when the ice had stretched away and melted into the darkness of the horizon."