Cornelia Funke: Likeness

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“I remember the feeling. Whenever my father got so absorbed in a book that we might have been in visible I felt like taking a pair of scissors and cutting it up.”

“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.”