Cornelia Funke Quotes

75 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Cornelia Funke
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.

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

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
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
They're all cruel,' he said. 'The world I come from, the world you come from, and this one, too. Maybe the people don't see the cruelty in your world right away, it's better hidden, but it's there all the same.

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

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

Cornelia Funke
Who are you?' Mo looked at the White Women. Then he looked at Dustfinger's still face. Guess.' The bird ruffled up its golden feathers, and Mo saw that the mark on its breast was blood. You are Death.' Mo felt the word heavy on his tongue. Could any word be heavier?

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

Cornelia Funke
My wife loves written words... you know, words that stick to parchment and paper like dead flies, and it seems my father felt the same - but I want to hear words! Remember that when you are looking for the right words: You must ask yourself what they SOUND like! Glowing with passion, dark with sorrow, sweet with love, that's what I want. - Cosimo

Cornelia Funke
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
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
The night breathed through the apartment like a dark animal. The ticking of a clock. The groan of a floorboard as he slipped out of his room. All was drowned by its silence. But Jacob loved the night. He felt it on his skin like a promise. Like a cloak woven from freedom and danger.

Cornelia Funke