Cornelia Funke quotes:

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  • My daughter, Anna, is almost 15, and my son, Ben, is almost 10.

  • Every German child learns to speak English in school.

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

  • There are not so many mythical creatures from Inkheart.

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

  • My grandmother told stories; she was very good at that.

  • 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.

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

  • I always wanted to ride a dragon myself, so I decided to do this for a year in my imagination.

  • Dustfinger closed his eyes and listened. He was home again.

  • He flung his arms around her neck, but only once he saw Silvertoungue's back was turned. He never knew with fathers. "I'll save him, Meggie!" he wispered in her ear. "I'll bring Dustfinger back. This story will have a happy ending.I swear!

  • 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.

  • I love to read, I love to watch movies, and I love to be with my children.

  • I think we should sometimes read stories where everything's different from our world, don't you agree? There's nothing's like it for teaching us to wonder why trees are green and not red, and why we have five fingers rather than six.' --spoken by The Bluejay, aka Mo the Bookbinder, from 'Inkdeath

  • 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.

  • What's that sticky stuff called? Basta: Duct tape. Yes, duct tape. I love duct tape.

  • 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.

  • Accursed, blasted, heartless things [books]! Full of empty promises, full of false lures, always making you hungry, never satisfying you, never!

  • Every reader knows about the feeling that characters in books seem more real than real people.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • And I always read the English translation and always have conversations with my translator, for example about the names. I always have to approve it.

  • I wish I had more time to visit schools.

  • The Magpie took off her glove and looked scornfully at him"Basta likes to use snakes to scare woman that reject his advances. It didn't work with Resa. How did it go exactly - didn't she finally put the snake outside your door, Basta?

  • 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.

  • Why could she remember nothing but stories of frightened people when Capricorn looked at her? She usually found it so easy to escape somewhere else, to get right inside the minds of people and animals who existed only on paper, so why not now? Because she was afraid. "Because fear kills everything," Mo had once told her. "Your mind, your heart, your imagination.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • Oh, I think every author is inspired by all of the books that she reads.

  • 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?

  • I always thought it hadn't influenced me very much, but I heard from many people from England that many motives from German fairytales are to be found in my books.

  • 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?

  • Power. Intoxicating. Like a fine wine.

  • 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.

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

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

  • Why did death make life taste so much sweeter? Why could the heart love only what it could also lose?

  • 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.

  • Hope. Nothing is more intoxicating.

  • 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.

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

  • We're all liars when it serves our purpose.

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

  • Life was more difficult in Inkheart, yet it seemed to Meggie that with every new day Fenoglio's story was spinning a magic spell around her heart, sticky as a spider's web and enchantingly beautiful..

  • 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?

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

  • 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.

  • I love to read aloud.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Memories, so sweet and bitter.. they had both nourished and devoured him for so many years. Until a time came when they began to fade, turning faint and blurred, only an ache to be quickly pushed away because it went to your heart. For what was the use of remembering all you had lost?

  • And I plan to write a sequel to Dragon Rider.

  • When the heart craved something so forcefully, then reason became nothing but helpless observer.

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

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

  • Io non credo fondamentalmente a nessuno, ormai dovresti saperlo. Siamo tutti bugiardi quando serve.

  • Faccio volentieri delle promesse, specialmente quelle che non posso mantenere.

  • Sai bene quanto il fuoco sia facile a offendersi.

  • 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.

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

  • Nothing is more terrifying than fearlessness.

  • They wouldn't tell Scipio how much of the counterfeit cash was left since, as Riccio put it, 'You're a detective now, after all.

  • It was a chilly morning after the night's rain, and the sun hung in the sky like a pale coin lost by someone high up in the clouds.

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

  • You really don't understand the first thing about writing...for one thing, early in the morning is the worst possible time. the brain is like a wet sponge at that hour. And for another, real writing is a question of staring into space and waiting for the right ideas.

  • 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.

  • I just did a picture book called The Wildest Brother on Earth, and you will find both of my children in there.

  • My wife loves written words ... you know, words that stick to parchment and paper like dead flies, and it seems my father felt the same - but I want to hear words! Remember that when you are looking for the right words: You must ask yourself what they SOUND like! Glowing with passion, dark with sorrow, sweet with love, that's what I want. - Cosimo

  • Second, there are so many magical places in books that you can't go to, like Hogwarts and Middle Earth, so I wanted to set a story in a place where children can actually go.

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

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

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

  • Words were useless. At times, they might sound wonderful, but they let you down the moment you really needed them. You could never find the right words, never, and where would you look for them? The heart is as silent as a fish, however much the tongue tries to give it a voice.

  • Nothing is more frightening than a fear you cannot name.

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

  • So what? All writers are lunatics!

  • 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.

  • 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

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

  • She always did like tales of adventure-stories full of brightness and darkness. She could tell you the names of all King Arthur's knights, and she knew everything about Beowulf and Grendel, the ancient gods and the not-quite-so-ancient heroes. She liked pirate stories, too, but most of all she loved books that had at least a knight or a dragon or a fairy in them. She was always on the dragon's side by the way.

  • Farid had brought an invisible guest with him. Fear.

  • What on earth have you packed in here? Bricks?" asked Mo as he carried Meggie's book-box out of the house. You're the one who says books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them," said Meggie.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

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

  • 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.

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

  • He longed for the deep as she longed for the night sky and for white lilies floating on water -- although she still tried to convince herself that love alone could feed her soul.

  • I like to visit my horse, have a walk with my dog.

  • Ten minutes can be a long time when you're waiting with a beating heart for something you don't understand, something you don't really want to know.

  • What was a slap for ten pages of escapism, ten pages far from everything that made him unhappy, ten pages of real life instead of the monotony that other people called the real world?

  • Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?

  • I will try to write books until I drop dead.

  • I don't like to eat the same dish every day, so I read very different things.

  • Meggie Folchart: Having writer's block? Maybe I can help. Fenoglio: Oh yes, that's right. You want to be a writer, don't you? Meggie Folchart: You say that as if it's a bad thing. Fenoglio: Oh no, it's just a lonely thing. Sometimes the world you create on the page seems more friendly and alive than the world you actually live in.

  • A thousand enemies outside the house are better than one within. Arab proverb

  • Let's run away to Venice, and hide out in an old movie theater. We can dye our hair blonde, so no one will ever find us!

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

  • The night breathed through the apartment like a dark animal. The ticking of a clock. The groan of a floorboard as he slipped out of his room. All was drowned by its silence. But Jacob loved the night. He felt it on his skin like a promise. Like a cloak woven from freedom and danger.

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

  • The tent in which she first met him had smelled of blood, of the death she did not understand, and still she had thought of it all as a game. She had promised him the world. His flesh in the flesh of his enemies. And much too late had she realized what he had sown in her. Love. Worst of all poisons.

  • The Fairy's dress rustled as she turned. Human women dressed like flowers, layers of petals around a mortal, rotting core.

  • -You forgot something important! -What? -It's under my sweater! -WHAT?! -Me!

  • My son always says I like very weird music.

  • Every book should begin with attractive endpapers. Preferably in a dark colour: dark red or dark blue, depending on the binding. When you open the book it's like going to the theatre. First you see the curtain. Then it's pulled aside and the show begins.

  • We all know what fun it can be to get right into a book and live there for a while, but falling out of a story and suddenly finding yourself in this world doesn't seem to be much fun at all.

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

  • Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.

  • He wants to be grown-up. How different dreams can be! Nature will soon grant your wish.

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

  • Since when does the butterfly ask about the caterpillar?

  • 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.

  • Many [book] even lay flat in the floor open. Their spines upward. Elinor couldn't bear to look! Didn't the monster know that was the way to break a book's neck?

  • Thats beautiful! Sad and beautiful," murmured Meggie. Why were sad stories often so beautiful? It was different in real life.

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