Cornelia Funke Quotes

Dustfinger still clearly remembered the feeling of being in love for the first time. How vulnerable his heart had suddenly been! Such a trembling, quivering thing, happy and miserably unhappy at once.

~ Cornelia Funke

Dustfinger inspected his reddened fingers and felt the taut skin. ‘He might tell me how my story ends,’ he murmured. Meggie looked at him in astonishment. ‘You mean you don’t know?’ Dustfinger smiled. Meggie still didn’t particularly like his smile. It seemed to appear only to hide something else. ‘What’s so unusual about that, princess?’ he asked quietly. ‘Do you know how your story ends?’ Meggie had no answer for that.

~ Cornelia Funke

Stories never really end...even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page.

~ Cornelia Funke

So what? All writers are lunatics!

~ Cornelia Funke

Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you secruity and friendship and didn't ask for anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.

~ Cornelia Funke

Women were different, no doubt about it. Men broke so much more quickly. Grief didn't break women. Instead it wore them down, it hollowed them out very slowly.

~ Cornelia Funke

And there stood Basta with his foot already on another dead body, smiling. Why not? He had hit his target, and it was the target he had been aiming for all along: Dustfinger’s heart, his stupid heart. It broke in two as he held Farid in his arms, it simply broke in two, although he had taken such good care of it all these years.

~ Cornelia Funke

Elinor had read countless stories in which the main characters fell sick at some point because they were so unhappy. She had always thought that a very romantic idea, but she’d dismissed it as a pure invention of the world of books. All those wilting heroes and heroines who suddenly gave up the ghost just because of unrequited love or longing for something they’d lost! Elinor had always enjoyed their sufferings—as a reader will. After all, that was what you wanted from books: great emotions you’d never felt yourself, pain you could leave behind by closing the book if it got too bad. Death and destruction felt deliciously real conjured up with the right words, and you could leave them behind between the pages as you pleased, at no cost or risk to yourself.

~ Cornelia Funke

He hablado ex profeso con el viento -anunció-, pues hay una cosa que debes saber: cuando el viento se obstina en jugar con el fuego, ni yo mismo puedo domeñarlo. Pero me ha dado su palabra de honor de que esta noche se mantendrá en calma y no nos estropeará la diversión.

~ Cornelia Funke

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?

~ Cornelia Funke

You know, it's a funny thing about writers. Most people don't stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago--they don't expect to meet them in the street or out shopping. They know their stories but not their names, and certainly not their faces. And most writers like it that way.

~ Cornelia Funke

As Mo had said: writing stories is a kind of magic, too.

~ Cornelia Funke

Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times? Mo had said...As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar.

~ Cornelia Funke

The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness - and love. Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.

~ Cornelia Funke

This book taught me, once and for all, how easily you can escape this world with the help of words! You can find friends between the pages of a book, wonderful friends.

~ Cornelia Funke

It's a good idea to have your own books with you in a strange place

~ Cornelia Funke

There was another reason [she] took her books whenever they went away. They were her home when she was somewhere strange. They were familiar voices, friends that never quarreled with her, clever, powerful friends -- daring and knowledgeable, tried and tested adventurers who had traveled far and wide. Her books cheered her up when she was sad and kept her from being bored.

~ Cornelia Funke

It [the book] was spinning a magic spell around her heart, sticky as a spider's web and enchantingly beautiful..

~ Cornelia Funke

Weren’t all books ultimately related? After all, the same letters filled them, just arranged in a different order. Which meant that, in a certain way, every book was contained in every other!

~ Cornelia Funke

So Mo began filling the silence with words. He lured them out of the pages as if they had only been waiting for his voice, words long and short, words sharp and soft, cooing, purring words. They danced through the room, painting stained glass pictures, tickling the skin. Even when Meggie nodded off she could still hear them, although Mo had closed the book long ago. Words that explained the world to her, its dark side and its light side, words that built a wall to keep out bad dreams. And not a single bad dream came over that wall for the rest of the night.

~ Cornelia Funke

Books are like flypaper, memories cling to the printed pages better than anything else.

~ Cornelia Funke

Nothing is more terrifying than fearlessness.

~ Cornelia Funke

-You forgot something important!-What?-It's under my sweater!-WHAT?!-Me!

~ Cornelia Funke

He saw so many emotions mingled on her face: anger disappointment, fear – and defiance. Like her daughter, thought Fenoglio again. So uncompromising, so strong. Women were different, no doubt about it. Men broke so much more quickly. Grief didn’t break women. Instead it wore them down, it hollowed them out, very slowly.

~ Cornelia Funke

She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn’t taste bad, but she was still unhappy.

~ Cornelia Funke

I always used to read aloud to her in the evenings--

~ Cornelia Funke

If you keep pretending you're in that book, it will make you not want to live in the life you're in.

~ Cornelia Funke

.......only the powerful were hated, and that was what he was meant to be in this world.Powerful.

~ Cornelia Funke

You're the one who says books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them...

~ Cornelia Funke

Courage was something John Reckless only ever wished he had. Courage was not a given; it was acquired, earned. You had to take the difficult paths, and John had always picked the easy ones.

~ Cornelia Funke

Children, they're the same everywhere. Greedy little creatures but the best listeners in the world -any world. The very best of all.

~ Cornelia Funke

Words,words filled the night like the fragrance of invisible flowers.

~ Cornelia Funke

The night belongs to beasts of prey, and always has. It's easy to forget that when you're indoors, protected by light and solid walls.

~ Cornelia Funke

She wanted to return to her dream. Perhaps it was still somewhere there behind her closed eyelids. Perhaps a little of its happiness still clung like gold dust to her lashes. Don't dreams in fairy tales sometimes leave a token behind?

~ Cornelia Funke

I'm only a kind of book doctor. I can give books new bindings, rejuvenate them a little, stop the bookworms from eating them, and prevent them from losing their pages over the years like a man loses his hair. But inventing the stories in them, filling new, empty pages with right words-- I can't do that. That's a very different trade. A famous writer once wrote, 'An author can be seen as three things: a storyteller, a teacher, or magician-- but a magician, the enchanter, is in the ascendant.

~ Cornelia Funke

When the heart craved something so forcefully, then reason became nothing but helpless observer.

~ Cornelia Funke

All writers are insane!

~ Cornelia Funke

Down there the nights are bright and nobody believes in the Devil.

~ Cornelia Funke

When it came to hiding, even Gwin had nothing to teach Dustfinger. A strange sense of curiosity had always driven him to explore the hidden, forgotten corners of this and any other place, and all that knowledge had now come in useful.

~ Cornelia Funke

What was this yearning, tearing at her insides like hunger and thirst? It couldn't be love. Love was warm and soft, like a bed of leaves. But this was dark, like the shade under a poisonous shrub, and it was hungry. So hungry. It must have some other name, just as there couldn't be the same word for life and death, or for moon and sun

~ Cornelia Funke