Cornelia Funke - Inkheart (2003)

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.

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

Cornelia Funke
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
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
Mo could paint pictures in the empty air with his voice alone.

Cornelia Funke
Dustfinger inspected his reddened fingers and felt the taut skin. 'He might tell me how my story ends,' he murmured. Meggie looked at him in astonishment. 'You mean you don't know?' Dustfinger smiled. Meggie still didn't particularly like his smile. It seemed to appear only to hide something else. 'What's so unusual about that, princess?' he asked quietly. 'Do you know how your story ends?' Meggie had no answer for that.

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

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

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

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