Cornelia Funke > Quotes

“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, Inkspell

“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, Inkspell

“Books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“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.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“So what? All writers are lunatics!”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

“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?”
― 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, Inkheart / Inkspell / Inkdeath

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

“Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask for anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly. Love, truth, beauty, wisdom and consolation against death. Who had said that? Someone else who loved books.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

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

“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, Inkspell

“It's a good idea to have your own books with you in a strange place”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“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.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath

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

“Writing stories is a kind of magic, too.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“There was another reason [she] took her books whenever they went away. They were her home when she was somewhere strange. They were familiar voices, friends that never quarreled with her, clever, powerful friends -- daring and knowledgeable, tried and tested adventurers who had traveled far and wide. Her books cheered her up when she was sad and kept her from being bored.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“Nothing is more frightening than a fear you cannot name.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

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

“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.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“You know a great many things in dreams, often despite the evidence of your eyes. You just know them.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“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, Inkheart

“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.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“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, Inkheart

“For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him.
Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted.
Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution.
Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his last punishment, let the flames of hell consume him for ever.

Curse on book thieves, from the monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“Fire and water," he said, "don't really mix. You could say they're incompatible. But when they do love each other, they love passionately.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

“A reader doesn't really see the characters in a story; he feels them.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath

“Hope. Nothing is more intoxicating.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath

“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, Inkheart

“you can not fully read a book without being alone. But through this very solitude you become intimately involved with people whom you might never have met otherwise, either because they have been dead for centuries or because they spoke languages you cannot understand. And, nonetheless, they have become your closest friends, your wisest advisors, the wizards that hypnotize you, the lovers you have always dreamed of.
-Antonio munoz molinas, "the power of the pen”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath

“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, Inkheart