The Thief Lord Quotes

“Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.”
― Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord

“-You forgot something important!
-What?
-It's under my sweater!
-WHAT?!
-Me!”
― Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord

“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

“He wants to be grown-up. How different dreams can be! Nature will soon grant your wish.”
― Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord

“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!”
― Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord

“Are you really going to catch us and take us back to Esther? We don’t belong to her, you know.”
Embarrassed, Victor stared at his shoes. “Well, children all have to belong to somebody,” he muttered.
“Do you belong to someone?”
“That’s different.”
“Because you’re a grown-up?”
― Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord

“For the hundredth time, she closed her eyes so she could see another room in her mind's eye, one with a curtain full of stars, and a mattress surrounded by books that whispered their stories to her at night. – Pg. 235”
― Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord

“Victor,” he asked, “what do adults do all day?” “Work,” Victor answered, “eat, shop, pay bills, use the phone, read newspapers, drink coffee, sleep.”
― Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord

“What nonsense! I just like to believe in fairy tales.”
― Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord

“Nonsense!” she shouted. “Where are you going to go? We all belong together. Your problems are our problems.”
― Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord

“He had lived in Venice for more than fifteen years and he still didn’t know all the city’s nooks and crannies — but then again no one did.”
― Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord

“The statue showed a man with a pile of books behind him. His name was Nicolò Tommaseo, but everyone in the city just call him the Book Man.”
― Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord

“Well, one thing's for sure, they're very strange names, and that's putting it mildly.”
― Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord

“The Hartliebs had no time for the snow. Outside their window, San Giorgio Maggiore seemed to be floating on the lagoon as if it had just surfaced there. The view was so beautiful that Victor felt his heart ache. Esther and her husband, however, stood side by side with their backs to the window.”
― Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord

“Verwandtschaft ist eben keine Garantie für Liebe.”
― Cornelia Funke, Herr Der Diebe -- The Thief Lord

“If, like Riccio, you didn’t have parents, it was easy to imagine how wonderful they might have been. But what if you had parents and they weren’t wonderful at all?”
― Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord

“For one short moment he had a crazy urge to lie down on one of the mattresses, to light a few of the many candles around the place, and to forget everything that had happened since his ninth birthday.”
― Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord

“Anything else? Ah, yes – Barbarossa… Esther carried on believing for quite a while that he was the most wonderful child she had ever met – until she caught him stuffing her most precious earrings into his trouser pockets and then discovered in his room an entire collection of valuable items that had mysteriously disappeared. Tearfully Esther sent him off to an expensive boarding school where Ernesto became the terror of his teachers and fellow pupils. Dreadful things were said about him: that he forced other children to do his homework and to clean his shoes, that he even encouraged them to steal things, and that he had given himself a name that everyone had to call him. It was ‘The Thief Lord’.”
― Cornelia Funke, Thief Lord