Quotes by Cornelia Funke

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.

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.

Stories never really end...even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They dont end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page.

So what? All writers are lunatics!

Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you secruity and friendship and didnt ask for anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.

Women were different, no doubt about it. Men broke so much more quickly. Grief didnt break women. Instead it wore them down, it hollowed them out very slowly.

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.

Elinor had read countless stories in which the main characters fell sick at some point because they were so unhappy. She had always thought that a very romantic idea, but she’d dismissed it as a pure invention of the world of books. All those wilting heroes and heroines who suddenly gave up the ghost just because of unrequited love or longing for something they’d lost! Elinor had always enjoyed their sufferings—as a reader will. After all, that was what you wanted from books: great emotions you’d never felt yourself, pain you could leave behind by closing the book if it got too bad. Death and destruction felt deliciously real conjured up with the right words, and you could leave them behind between the pages as you pleased, at no cost or risk to yourself.

Killing is easy, said Mo, Dying is harder...

He hablado ex profeso con el viento -anunció-, pues hay una cosa que debes saber: cuando el viento se obstina en jugar con el fuego, ni yo mismo puedo domeñarlo. Pero me ha dado su palabra de honor de que esta noche se mantendrá en calma y no nos estropeará la diversión.

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?

You know, its a funny thing about writers. Most people dont stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago--they dont 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.

Read – and be curious. And if somebody says to you: Things are this way. You cant change it - dont believe a word.

As Mo had said: writing stories is a kind of magic, too.

Isnt it odd how much fatter a book gets when youve 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.

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.

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 didnt ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.

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.

Its a good idea to have your own books with you in a strange place

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.