Cornelia Funke
26 quotes
Biography
Cornelia Maria Funke is a German author of children's fiction. Born in Dorsten, North Rhine-Westphalia, she began her career as a social worker before becoming a book illustrator.
"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."
"Books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them."
"So what? All writers are lunatics!"
"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."
"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?"
"Because fear kills everything,"Mo had once told her. "Your mind, your heart, your imagination."
"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."
"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."
"It's a good idea to have your own books with you in a strange place"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Weren’t all books ultimately related? After all, the same letters filled them, just arranged in a different order. Which meant that, in a certain way, every book was contained in every other!"
"It [the book] was spinning a magic spell around her heart, sticky as a spider's web and enchantingly beautiful.."
"Read – and be curious. And if somebody says to you: 'Things are this way. You can't change it' - don't believe a word."
"I always wanted to ride a dragon myself, so I decided to do this for a year in my imagination."
"Killing is easy," said Mo, "Dying is harder..."
"Courage was something John Reckless only ever wished he had. Courage was not a given; it was acquired, earned. You had to take the difficult paths, and John had always picked the easy ones."
"Children, they're the same everywhere. Greedy little creatures but the best listeners in the world -any world. The very best of all."
"Words,words filled the night like the fragrance of invisible flowers."
"She felt as if the grave stones were whispering those names to her as she walked past... Those stones that bore no names seemed like closed mouths, sad mouths that forgotten how to speak. But perhaps the dead didn't mind what their names had once been?"
"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'm perfectly happy to know the world at secondhand. It's a lot safer."