Quotes by Cornelia Funke

It [the book] was spinning a magic spell around her heart, sticky as a spiders web and enchantingly beautiful..

Weren’t all books ultimately related? After all, the same letters filled them, just arranged in a different order. Which meant that, in a certain way, every book was contained in every other!

So Mo began filling the silence with words. He lured them out of the pages as if they had only been waiting for his voice, words long and short, words sharp and soft, cooing, purring words. They danced through the room, painting stained glass pictures, tickling the skin. Even when Meggie nodded off she could still hear them, although Mo had closed the book long ago. Words that explained the world to her, its dark side and its light side, words that built a wall to keep out bad dreams. And not a single bad dream came over that wall for the rest of the night.

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

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

Nothing is more terrifying than fearlessness.

-You forgot something important!-What?-Its under my sweater!-WHAT?!-Me!

He saw so many emotions mingled on her face: anger disappointment, fear – and defiance. Like her daughter, thought Fenoglio again. So uncompromising, so strong. 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.

She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn’t taste bad, but she was still unhappy.

I always used to read aloud to her in the evenings--

How ridiculous that water ran out of your eyes when your heart hurt. Tragic heroines in books tended to be amazingly beautiful. Not a word about swollen eyes or a red nose. Crying always gives me a red nose, thought Elinor. I expect thats why Ill never be in any book.

If you keep pretending youre in that book, it will make you not want to live in the life youre in.

.......only the powerful were hated, and that was what he was meant to be in this world.Powerful.

Youre the one who says books have to be heavy because the whole worlds inside them...

Courage was something John Reckless only ever wished he had. Courage was not a given; it was acquired, earned. You had to take the difficult paths, and John had always picked the easy ones.

Children, theyre the same everywhere. Greedy little creatures but the best listeners in the world -any world. The very best of all.

Words,words filled the night like the fragrance of invisible flowers.

The night belongs to beasts of prey, and always has. Its easy to forget that when youre indoors, protected by light and solid walls.

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. Dont dreams in fairy tales sometimes leave a token behind?

Im only a kind of book doctor. I can give books new bindings, rejuvenate them a little, stop the bookworms from eating them, and prevent them from losing their pages over the years like a man loses his hair. But inventing the stories in them, filling new, empty pages with right words-- I cant do that. Thats a very different trade. A famous writer once wrote, An author can be seen as three things: a storyteller, a teacher, or magician-- but a magician, the enchanter, is in the ascendant.