Cornelia Funke Quotes

There are not so many mythical creatures from Inkheart.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Second, there are so many magical places in books that you cant go to, like Hogwarts and Middle Earth, so I wanted to set a story in a place where children can actually go.

A library book, I imagine, is a happy book.

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

If you take a book with you on a journey," Mo had said when he put the first one in her box, "an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it... yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.

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

I have two Iceland horses, a very hairy dog called Looney, and a guinea pig.

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?

If I was a book, I would like to be a library book, so I would be taken home by all different sorts of kids.

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.

Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness and love.

But after all, the villains are the salt in the soup of a story.

Nothing is more frightening than a fear you cannot name.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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

We're all liars when it serves our purpose.

And there stood Basta with his foot already on another dead body, smiling. Why not? He had hit his target, and it was the target he had been aiming for all along: Dustfinger’s heart, his stupid heart. It broke in two as he held Farid in his arms, it simply broke in two, although he had taken such good care of it all these years.

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.

Writing stories is a kind of magic, too.

What's the matter princess? Do you know the end of your story?

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

Mortimer's face twisted when the Piper pressed his knife against his ribs. Oh yes, he's obviously made the wrong enemies in this story, thought Orpheus. And the wrong friends. But that was high-minded heroes for you. Stupid.

From the tower battlements, Dustfinger looked down on a lake as black as night, where the reflection of the castle swam in a sea of stars. The wind passing over his unscarred face was cold from the snow of the surrounding mountains, and Dustfinger relished life as if he were tasting it for the first time. The longing it brought, and the desire. All the bitterness, all the sweetness, even if it was only for a while, never for more than a while, everything gained and lost, lost and found again.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

Hey, don't take this the wrong way, but don't come back, ok?

So what? All writers are lunatics!

No prince had lived in those wretched hovels, no red-robed bishops, only farmers and laborers whose stories no one had written down, and now they were lost, buried under wild thyme and fast growing spurge.

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

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

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

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.

This world,' she said. 'Do you really like it?' What a question! Farid never asked himself such things. He was glad to be with Dustfinger again and didn't mind where that was. It's a cruel world, don't you think?' Meggie went on. 'Mo often told me I forget how cruel it is too easily.' With his burned fingers, Farid stroke her fair hair. It shone even in the dark. '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.

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

I live in Hamburg; that's in the north. And I live on the outskirts of town. It looks like countryside.

I like a composer called Henry Purcell, and I love to listen to Neil Young.

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?