Cornelia Funke famous quotes

You know what they say: When people start burning books they'll soon burn human beings.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Book #People #Burning

If you take a book with you on a journey," Mo had said when he put the first one in her box, "an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it... yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Memories #Book #Reading

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

#Women #Grief #Doubt

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

#Dream #Book #Reading

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

#Real #Reading #Character

So what? All writers are lunatics!
-- Cornelia Funke

#Writing

A library book, I imagine, is a happy book.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Book #Reading #Thought Provoking

The book she had been reading was under her pillow, pressing its cover against her ear as if to lure her back into its printed pages.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Book #Reading #Ears

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

#Book #Thinking #Funny Things

When you open a book it's like going to the theater first you see the curtain then it is pulled aside and the show begins.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Book #Firsts #Theater

You know a great many things in dreams, often despite the evidence of your eyes. You just know them.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Dream #Eye #Evidence

The truth's not pretty of course. No one likes to look it in the face.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Looks #Likes #Faces

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

#Inspirational #Book #Cheer Up

We're all liars when it serves our purpose.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Liars #Purpose #Inkheart

Why did death make life taste so much sweeter? Why could the heart love only what it could also lose?
-- Cornelia Funke

#Heart #Taste #Heart Love

In love - it sounded like a sickness without any cure, and wasn't that just how it sometimes felt?
-- Cornelia Funke

#Sometimes #Sickness #Cures

A reader doesn't really see the characters in a story; he feels them.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Character #Stories #Reader

The sea always filled her with longing, though for what she was never sure.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Sea #Longing #Filled

If I was a book, I would like to be a library book, so I would be taken home by all different sorts of kids.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Book #Taken #Home

I always wanted to ride a dragon myself, so I decided to do this for a year in my imagination.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Dragons #Years #Imagination

Nothing is more terrifying than fearlessness.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Fear #Fearlessness

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

#Book #Ideas #Strange

And I always read the English translation and always have conversations with my translator, for example about the names. I always have to approve it.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Names #Example #Conversation

And I plan to write a sequel to Dragon Rider.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Writing #Dragons #Riders

Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness and love.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Book #Happiness And Love #Comfort

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

#Flower #Book #Smell

Books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Book #World #Heavy

Every reader knows about the feeling that characters in books seem more real than real people.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Real #Book #Character

Is there anything in the world better than words on the page? Magic signs, the voices of the dead, building blocks to make wonderful worlds better than this one, comforters, companions in loneliness. Keepers of secrets, speakers of the truth...all those glorious words.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Block #Loneliness #Voice

Words are immortal - Elinor
-- Cornelia Funke

#Immortal

Why do grown-ups think it's easier for children to bear secrets than the truth? Don't they know about the horror stories we imagine to explain the secrets?
-- Cornelia Funke

#Children #Thinking #Secret

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

#Sweaters #Important

Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there's a whole world that goes on - developing and changing like our own world.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Book #Stories #Goes On

The tent in which she first met him had smelled of blood, of the death she did not understand, and still she had thought of it all as a game. She had promised him the world. His flesh in the flesh of his enemies. And much too late had she realized what he had sown in her. Love. Worst of all poisons.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Blood #Games #Enemy

Please," she whispered as she opened the book, "please get me out of here just for an hour or so, please take me far, far away
-- Cornelia Funke

#Book #Far Away #Hours

He longed for the deep as she longed for the night sky and for white lilies floating on water -- although she still tried to convince herself that love alone could feed her soul.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Night #Sky #White

Thats beautiful! Sad and beautiful," murmured Meggie. Why were sad stories often so beautiful? It was different in real life.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Beautiful #Real #Different

Sometimes Dustfinger thought Basta's constant fear of curses and sudden disaster probably arose from his terror of the darkness within himself, which made him assume that the rest of the world must be exactly the same.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Darkness #World #Assuming

The heart was a weak, changeable thing, bent on nothing but love, and there could be no more fatal mistake than to make it your master. Reason must be in charge. It comforted you for the heart's foolishness, it sang mocking songs about love, derided it as a whim of nature, transient as flowers. So why did she still keep following her heart?
-- Cornelia Funke

#Song #Mistake #Flower

My dear Elinor, you were obviously born into the wrong story,” said Dustfinger at last.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Stories #Lasts #Born

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

#Memories #Book #Pages

Where did the love come from? What was it made of?
-- Cornelia Funke

#Made

All books are in safe hands with me. They're my children, my inky children, and I look after them well. I keep the sunlight away from their pages, I dust and protect them from hungry hookworms and grubby human fingers.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Children #Book #Dust

She pressed her hand against her chest. No heart. So where did the love she felt come from?
-- Cornelia Funke

#Heart #Hands

Neither Goyl nor men lived long enough to understand that yesterday was born of tomorrow, just as tomorrow was born of yesterday.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Men #Yesterday #Long

Nobody loves only once.
-- Cornelia Funke

I'm perfectly happy to know the world at secondhand. It's a lot safer.
-- Cornelia Funke

#World

What a plague love is!
-- Cornelia Funke

#Love Is #Plague

It's a cruel world, don't you think?
-- Cornelia Funke

#Thinking #World

It's the same in real life: Notorious murderers get off scot-free and live happily all their lives, while good people die - sometimes the very best people. That's the way of the world.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Real #People #World

What was a slap for ten pages of escapism, ten pages far from everything that made him unhappy, ten pages of real life instead of the monotony that other people called the real world?
-- Cornelia Funke

#Real #People #Unhappy

Reality is a fragile thing.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Reality #Fragile Things

Memories, so sweet and bitter.. they had both nourished and devoured him for so many years. Until a time came when they began to fade, turning faint and blurred, only an ache to be quickly pushed away because it went to your heart. For what was the use of remembering all you had lost?
-- Cornelia Funke

#Sweet #Memories #Heart

The Fairy's dress rustled as she turned. Human women dressed like flowers, layers of petals around a mortal, rotting core.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Flower #Dresses #Rotting

Meggie Folchart: Having writer's block? Maybe I can help. Fenoglio: Oh yes, that's right. You want to be a writer, don't you? Meggie Folchart: You say that as if it's a bad thing. Fenoglio: Oh no, it's just a lonely thing. Sometimes the world you create on the page seems more friendly and alive than the world you actually live in.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Lonely #Block #Friendly

Are you really going to catch us and take us back to Esther? We don’t belong to her, you know.” Embarrassed, Victor stared at his shoes. “Well, children all have to belong to somebody,” he muttered. “Do you belong to someone?” “That’s different.” “Because you’re a grown-up?
-- Cornelia Funke

#Children #Shoes #Different

Many [book] even lay flat in the floor open. Their spines upward. Elinor couldn't bear to look! Didn't the monster know that was the way to break a book's neck?
-- Cornelia Funke

#Book #Monsters #Looks

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

#Wall #Night #Light

I love to read, I love to watch movies, and I love to be with my children.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Children #Watches #Watch Movie

I like to visit my horse, have a walk with my dog.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Dog #Horse #My Dog

I love to read aloud.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Love To Read

My grandmother told stories; she was very good at that.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Grandmother #Stories #Very Good

Yes, I do enjoy walking at night. The world’s more to my liking then, not so loud, not so fast, not so crowded, and a good deal more mysterious.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Night #World #Mysterious

Ten minutes can be a long time when you're waiting with a beating heart for something you don't understand, something you don't really want to know.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Heart #Long #Waiting

Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?
-- Cornelia Funke

#Book #Odd

I wish I had more time to visit schools.
-- Cornelia Funke

#School #Wish #More Time

My son always says I like very weird music.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Son #My Son

There are not so many mythical creatures from Inkheart.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Mythical Creatures #Inkheart #Creatures

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

#Children #World #Littles

Accursed, blasted, heartless things [books]! Full of empty promises, full of false lures, always making you hungry, never satisfying you, never!
-- Cornelia Funke

#Book #Heartless #Promise

A thousand enemies outside the house are better than one within. Arab proverb
-- Cornelia Funke

#House #Enemy #Thousand

No prince had lived in those wretched hovels, no red-robed bishops, only farmers and laborers whose stories no one had written down, and now they were lost, buried under wild thyme and fast growing spurge.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Thyme #Bishops #Stories

Second, there are so many magical places in books that you cant go to, like Hogwarts and Middle Earth, so I wanted to set a story in a place where children can actually go.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Children #Book #Stories

I will try to write books until I drop dead.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Book #Writing #Trying

I live in Hamburg; that's in the north. And I live on the outskirts of town. It looks like countryside.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Looks #Towns #Countryside

I don't like to eat the same dish every day, so I read very different things.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Different #Dishes

I just did a picture book called The Wildest Brother on Earth, and you will find both of my children in there.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Brother #Children #Book

I have two Iceland horses, a very hairy dog called Looney, and a guinea pig.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Dog #Horse #Pigs

Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Children #Butterfly #Adults

Let's run away to Venice, and hide out in an old movie theater. We can dye our hair blonde, so no one will ever find us!
-- Cornelia Funke

#Running #Hair #Venice

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

#Dream #Dust #Gold

We all know what fun it can be to get right into a book and live there for a while, but falling out of a story and suddenly finding yourself in this world doesn't seem to be much fun at all.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Fun #Book #Fall

Every book should begin with attractive endpapers. Preferably in a dark colour: dark red or dark blue, depending on the binding. When you open the book it's like going to the theatre. First you see the curtain. Then it's pulled aside and the show begins.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Book #Dark #Blue

She is a real bookworm. I think she lives on print. Her whole house is full of books - looks as if she likes them better than human company.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Real #Book #Thinking

So it's happened, I kept thinking, you're in the middle of a story exactly as you've always wanted, and it's horrible. Fear tastes quite different when you're not just reading about it, Meggie, and playing hero wasn't half as much fun as I'd expected.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Fun #Fear #Reading

Since when does the butterfly ask about the caterpillar?
-- Cornelia Funke

#Butterfly #Doe #Caterpillars

He wants to be grown-up. How different dreams can be! Nature will soon grant your wish.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Dream #Wish #Different

But after all, the villains are the salt in the soup of a story.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Stories #Soup #Salt

I always thought it hadn't influenced me very much, but I heard from many people from England that many motives from German fairytales are to be found in my books.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Book #People #Fairytale

Everything gets to me. I'm very sentimental.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Sentimental

And my father always took me to the library. We were both book addicts.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Father #Book #Library

Every German child learns to speak English in school.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Children #School #Speak

My daughter, Anna, is almost 15, and my son, Ben, is almost 10.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Daughter #Mother #Son

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

#Heart #Reason #Helpless

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

#Flower #Night #Invisible

What are stories for if we don't learn from them?
-- Cornelia Funke

#Stories

Power. Intoxicating. Like a fine wine.
-- Cornelia Funke

#Wine #Fine #Fine Wine

What's the matter princess? Do you know the end of your story?
-- Cornelia Funke

#Princess #Stories #Matter