Cornelia Funke Quotes

“Some books should be tasted, some devoured but only few should be chewed and digested thouroughly”

“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?”

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

“What are stories for if we don't learn from them?”

“Nothing is more frightening than a fear you cannot name.”

“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!”

“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.”

“Her curiosity was too much for her. She felt almost as if she could hear the books whispering on the other side of the half-open door. They were promising her a thousand unknown stories, a thousand doors into worlds she had never seen before.”

“You know what they say: When people start burning books they'll soon burn human beings.”

“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.”

“Because fear kills everything," Mo had once told her. "Your mind, your heart, your imagination.”

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

“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.”

“Sometimes, when you're so sad you don't know what to do, it helps to be angry.”

“Sometimes it's a good thing we don't remember things half as well as books do.”

“You know a great many things in dreams, often despite the evidence of your eyes. You just know them.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Fire and water," he said, "don't really mix. You could say they're incompatible. But when they do love each other, they love passionately.”

“A reader doesn't really see the characters in a story; he feels them.”

“Hope. Nothing is more intoxicating.”

“I prefer a story that has the good sense to stay on the page where it belongs.
- Elinor”

“a book always keeps something of its owner between its pages.”

“Mo could paint pictures in the empty air with his voice alone.”

“All writers are insane!”

“What on earth have you packed in here? Bricks?" asked Mo as he carried Meggie's book-box out of the house.
You're the one who says books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them," said Meggie.”

“I wish you luck,' she said, kissing him on the cheek. He still had the most beautiful eyes of any boy she'd ever seen. But now her heart beat so much faster for someone else.”

“There could be few men whose love for a woman had been written on his face with a knife.”

“My children were all made from paper and printer's ink…”

“Why did death make life taste so much sweeter? Why could the heart love only what it could also lose?”

“Life was more difficult in Inkheart, yet it seemed to Meggie that with every new day Fenoglio's story was spinning a magic spell around her heart, sticky as a spider's web and enchantingly beautiful..”

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

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

“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.”

“Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.”

“Sometimes, when you’re sad you don’t know what to do, it helps to be angry. But then the tears come back again all the same, and you fall asleep with the salty taste of them on your lips.”

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

“Read – and be curious. And if somebody says to you: 'Things are this way. You can't change it' - don't believe a word.”

“Youcrazy!" whispered Meggie. "You're a total lunatic!"

But her opinion did not impress Fenoglio in the slightest. "So what? All writers are lunatics!”

“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?”

“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.”

“The truth's not pretty of course. No one likes to look it in the face.”

“The night swallowed him up like a thieving fox.”

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

“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”

“perhaps because this time not fear but love made him read.”

“We're all liars when it serves our purpose.”

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

“Didn't books say that too: that there is always price to pay for happiness?”

“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.”

“Dustfinger closed his eyes and listened.
He was home again.”

“believe me. Sometimes when life looks to be at its grimmest, there's a light hidden at the heart of things.
Clive Barker, Abarat”

“The spoken word is nothing. It hardly lives longer than an insect! Only the written word is eternal. - Balbulus”

“Reality is a fragile thing.”

“Why would we ever want to go back when your world is so accommodating with your telephones and your guns and what's that sticky stuff called… duct tape.”

“Words are immortal - Elinor”

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

“Nobody loves only once.”

“Nothing chased nightmares away faster than the rustle of printed paper.”

“They wouldn't tell Scipio how much of the counterfeit cash was left since, as Riccio put it, 'You're a detective now, after all.”

“Don't let it worry you, not being able to speak,'Dustfinger had often told her. 'People tend not to listen anyway, right?”