Cornelia Funke > Quotes

“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

“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

“Books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“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, 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

“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

“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

“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 slowly. ~pg 164”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath

“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

“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?”
― Cornelia Funke

“You know a great many things in dreams, often despite the evidence of your eyes. You just know them.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Sometimes it's a good thing we don't remember things half as well as books do.”
― 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

“I prefer a story that has the good sense to stay on the page where it belongs.
- Elinor”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“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

“Hope. Nothing is more intoxicating.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath

“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

“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

“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

“Her curiosity was too much for her. She felt almost as if she could hear the books whispering on the other side of the half-open door. They were promising her a thousand unknown stories, a thousand doors into worlds she had never seen before.”
― 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

“a book always keeps something of its owner between its pages.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

“Mo could paint pictures in the empty air with his voice alone.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“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, 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.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“Nothing is more terrifying than fearlessness.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath

“My children were all made from paper and printer's ink...”
― Cornelia Funke

“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

“There could be few men whose love for a woman had been written on his face with a knife.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

“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

“I pledge to set out to live a thousand lives between printed pages.

I pledge to use books as doors to other minds, old and young, girl and boy, man and animal.

I pledge to use books to open windows to a thousand different worlds and to the thousand different faces of my own world.

I pledge to use books to make my universe spread much wider than the world I live in every day.

I pledge to treat my books like friends, visiting them all from time to time and keeping them close.”
― Cornelia Funke

“The sea always filled her with longing, though for what she was never sure.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“Cheeseface.”
― Cornelia Funke

“Because by now Elinor had understood this, too: A longing for books was nothing compared with what you could feel for human beings. The books told you about that feeling. The books spoke of love, and it was wonderful to listen to them, but they were no substitute for love itself. They couldn't kiss her like Meggie, they couldn't hug her like Resa, they couldn't laugh like Mortimer. Poor books, poor Elinor.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath

“In love - it sounded like a sickness without any cure, and wasn't that just how it sometimes felt?”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath

“Writing stories is a kind of magic, too.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“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.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath

“A reader dosen't really see the characters in a story; he feels them.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath

“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.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath