"Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

"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)

"Books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

"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)

"If you take a book with you on a journey,...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)

"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 Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, and Inkdeath)

"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)

"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)

"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

"Blue as the evening sky, blue as cranesbill flowers, blue as the lips of drowned men and the heart of a blaze burning with too hot a flame. Yes, sometimes it was hot in this world, too. Hot and cold, light and dark, terrible and beautiful, it was everything all at once. It wasn't true that you felt nothing in the land of Death. You felt and heard and smelled and saw, but your heart remained strangely calm, as if it were resting before the dance began again.

Peace. Was that the word?"
— Cornelia Funke (Inkdeath)

"'Stories never really end, Meggie,' he had once told her, '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

" 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."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkspell)

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

"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.."
— Cornelia Funke

""Women were different, no doubt about it. Men broke so much more quickly. Greif didn't break women. Instead it wore them down, it hollowed them out very slwoly. ~pg 164 of Inkdeath"
— Cornelia Funke (Inkdeath)

"It's a good idea to have your own books with you in a strange place"
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

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

"Cheeseface."
— Cornelia Funke

"'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."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkdeath)

"I prefer a story that has the good sense to stay on the page where it belongs.
- Elinor"
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

"Desperate? So what? I'm desperate, too!" Fenoglio snapped at her. "My story is foundering in misfortune, and these hands here," he said holding them out to her, "don't want to write anymore! I'm afraid of words Meggie! 'Once they were like honey, now they're poison, pure poison! But what is a writer who doesn't love words anymore? What have I come to? This story is devouring me, crushing me, and I'm it's creator!"
— Cornelia Funke (Inkspell)

"...perhaps because this time not fear but love made him read.

-Inkdeath"
— Cornelia Funke

"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)

". . . fear kills everything. Your mind, your heart, your imagination."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

"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. "
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

"You are crazy!" whispered Meggie. "You're a total lunatic!"

But her opinion did not impress Fenoglio in the slightest. "So what? All writers are lunatics!"
— Cornelia Funke (Inkspell)

"Mo could paint pictures in the empty air with his voice alone."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

"Let's be off before he gets his great horesy teeth into my poor lines of verse!"
— Cornelia Funke (Inkspell)

"'This world,' she said. 'Do you really like it?'
What a question! Farid never asked himself such things. He was glad to be with Dustfinger again and didn't mind where that was.
'It's a cruel world, don't you think?' Meggie went on. 'Mo often told me I forget how cruel it is too easily.'
With his burned fingers, Farid stroke her fair hair. It shone even in the dark. 'They're all cruel,' he said. 'The world I come from, the world you come from, and this one, too. Maybe the people don't see the cruelty in your world right away, it's better hidden, but it's there all the same.'"
— Cornelia Funke (Inkspell)

"I remember the feeling. Whenever my father got so absorbed in a book that we might have been in visible I felt like taking a pair of scissors and cutting it up."
— Cornelia Funke

"My children were all made from paper and printer's ink..."
— Cornelia Funke

"There could be few men whose love for a woman had been written on his face with a knife."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkspell)

"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.'"
— Cornelia Funke (The Thief Lord)

""What on earth have you packed in hear? 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."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

"The night swallowed him up like a thieving fox."
— 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)

"Quite suddenly Meggie felt fear rise in her like black brackish water, she felt lost, terribly lost, she felt it in every part of her. She didn't belong here! What had she done?"
— Cornelia Funke

"Beauty and fear make uneasy companions"
— Cornelia Funke

"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)

"Dustfinger closed his eyes and listened.
He was home again."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkspell)

"...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)

"“You know a great many things in dreams, often despite the evidence of your eyes. You just know them. …She wanted to return to her dream. Perhaps it was still there behind her closed eyelids. Perhaps a little of its happiness still clung like gold dust to her lashes.”"
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

"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."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkdeath)

"Go back and rid the word of that book. Fill it with words before spring comes, or winter will never end for you. And I will take not only your life for the Adderhead's but your daughter's, too, because she helped yoy bind th book. Do you undersand, Bluejay"
"Why two?" asked Mo hoarsely. "How can you ask for two lives in return for one?""
— Cornelia Funke (Inkdeath)

"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!""
— Cornelia Funke (Inkspell)

"Books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them. "
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

""Sometimes it's a good thing we don't remember things half as well as books do.""
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)