Cornelia Funke Quotes

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

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.

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.

A reader doesn't really see the characters in a story; he feels them.

Nothing is more frightening than a fear you cannot name.

Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.

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

Books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them.

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

She is a real bookworm. I think she lives on print. Her whole house is full of books - looks as if she likes them better than human company.

Please," she whispered as she opened the book, "please get me out of here just for an hour or so, please take me far, far away

She pressed her hand against her chest. No heart. So where did the love she felt come from?

If you take a book with you on a journey," Mo had said when he put the first one in her box, "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.

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.

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?

Nothing is more terrifying than fearlessness.

Hope. Nothing is more intoxicating.

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.

Farid had brought an invisible guest with him. Fear.

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?

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.

If you keep pretending you're in that book, it will make you not want to live in the life you're in.

The truth's not pretty of course. No one likes to look it in the face.

The sea always filled her with longing, though for what she was never sure.

Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness and love.