Cornelia Funke Quotes

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

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

Nobody loves only once.

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.

Why do grown-ups think it's easier for children to bear secrets than the truth? Don't they know about the horror stories we imagine to explain the secrets?

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!

a book always keeps something of its owner between its pages.

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.

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

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.

Every German child learns to speak English in school.

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

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!

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.

Let's be off before he gets his great horsey teeth into my poor lines of verse!

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.

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

Sometimes, when you're so sad you don't know what to do, it helps to be angry.

Power. Intoxicating. Like a fine wine.

How fast the ears learned to tell what sounds meant, much faster than it took the eyes to decipher written words.

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.

I love to read aloud.

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

She had only to open a door, nothing but a door between the words,just large enough for her and Farid to pass through.

What a plague love is!

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

The spoken word is nothing. It hardly lives longer than an insect! Only the written word is eternal. - Balbulus

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.

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

They are shooting The Thief Lord in Venice at the moment.

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.

Nothing chased nightmares away faster than the rustle of printed paper.

The Fairy's dress rustled as she turned.

Human women dressed like flowers, layers of petals around a mortal, rotting core.

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.

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.

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.

And my father always took me to the library. We were both book addicts.

Nothing is more terrifying than fearlessness.

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?

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.

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

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

It's the same in real life: Notorious murderers get off scot-free and live happily all their lives, while good people die - sometimes the very best people. That's the way of the world.

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

Mo could paint pictures in the empty air with his voice alone.

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.

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?

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

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

Sometimes, when you’re sad you don’t know what to do, it helps to be angry.

But then the tears come back again all the same, and you fall asleep with the salty taste of them on your lips.