Cornelia Funke Quotes

75 Sourced Quotes

Quite suddenly Meggie felt fear rise in her like black brackish water, she felt lost, terribly lost, she felt it in every part of her. She didn't belong here! What had she done?

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
I think we should sometimes read stories where everything's different from our world, don't you agree? There's nothing's like it for teaching us to wonder why trees are green and not red, and why we have five fingers rather than six.' —spoken by The Bluejay, aka Mo the Bookbinder, from 'Inkdeath

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

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
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
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
He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her full on the mouth. His skin was wet with rain. When she didn't pull away, he took her face between his hands and kissed her again, on her forehead, on her nose, on her mouth once more. "You will come, won't you? Promisse!" he whispered.

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

Cornelia Funke
How fast the ears learned to tell what sounds meant, much faster than it took the eyes to decipher written words.

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

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

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

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

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

Cornelia Funke
Perhaps there's another, much larger story behind the printed one, a story that changes just as our own world does. And the letters on the page tell us only as much as we'd see peering through a keyhole. 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
Desperate? So what? I'm desperate, too!" Fenoglio snapped at her. "My story is foundering in misfortune, and these hands here," he said holding them out to her, "don't want to write anymore! I'm afraid of words Meggie! 'Once they were like honey, now they're poison, pure poison! But what is a writer who doesn't love words anymore? What have I come to? This story is devouring me, crushing me, and I'm it's creator!

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

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

Cornelia Funke
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.

Cornelia Funke
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
The books in Mo and Meggie's house were stacked under tables, on chairs, in the corners of the rooms. There where books in the kitchen and books in the lavatory. Books on the TV set and in the closet, small piles of books, tall piles of books, books thick and thin, books old and new. They welcomed Meggie down to breakfast with invitingly opened pages; they kept boredom at bay when the weather was bad. And sometimes you fall over them.

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

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

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

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

Cornelia Funke
She always did like tales of adventure-stories full of brightness and darkness. She could tell you the names of all King Arthur's knights, and she knew everything about Beowulf and Grendel, the ancient gods and the not-quite-so-ancient heroes. She liked pirate stories, too, but most of all she loved books that had at least a knight or a dragon or a fairy in them. She was always on the dragon's side by the way.

Cornelia Funke
Let's be off before he gets his great horsey teeth into my poor lines of verse!

Cornelia Funke
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
Nothing chased nightmares away faster than the rustle of printed paper.

Cornelia Funke