Best 189 quotes of Cornelia Funke on MyQuotes

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

Accursed, blasted, heartless things [books]! Full of empty promises, full of false lures, always making you hungry, never satisfying you, never!

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

All books are in safe hands with me. They're my children, my inky children, and I look after them well. I keep the sunlight away from their pages, I dust and protect them from hungry hookworms and grubby human fingers.

And I always read the English translation and always have conversations with my translator, for example about the names. I always have to approve it.

And I plan to write a sequel to Dragon Rider.

And my father always took me to the library. We were both book addicts.

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.

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

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?

Beauty and fear make uneasy companions

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.

believe me. Sometimes when life looks to be at its grimmest, there's a light hidden at the heart of things. Clive Barker, Abarat

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?

Books are like flypaper, memories cling to the printed pages better than anything else.

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

But after all, the villains are the salt in the soup of a story.

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

Children, they're the same everywhere. Greedy little creatures but the best listeners in the world - any world. The very best of all.

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!

Didn't books say that too: that there is always price to pay for happiness?

Don't let it worry you, not being able to speak,'Dustfinger had often told her. 'People tend not to listen anyway, right?

Dustfinger closed his eyes and listened. He was home again.

Dustfinger inspected his reddened fingers and felt the taut skin. ‘He might tell me how my story ends,’ he murmured. Meggie looked at him in astonishment. ‘You mean you don’t know?’ Dustfinger smiled. Meggie still didn’t particularly like his smile. It seemed to appear only to hide something else. ‘What’s so unusual about that, princess?’ he asked quietly. ‘Do you know how your story ends?’ Meggie had no answer for that.

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.

Every book should begin with attractive endpapers. Preferably in a dark colour: dark red or dark blue, depending on the binding. When you open the book it's like going to the theatre. First you see the curtain. Then it's pulled aside and the show begins.

Every German child learns to speak English in school.

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.

From the tower battlements, Dustfinger looked down on a lake as black as night, where the reflection of the castle swam in a sea of stars. The wind passing over his unscarred face was cold from the snow of the surrounding mountains, and Dustfinger relished life as if he were tasting it for the first time. The longing it brought, and the desire. All the bitterness, all the sweetness, even if it was only for a while, never for more than a while, everything gained and lost, lost and found again.

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 you bind the book. Do you undersand, Bluejay" Why two?" asked Mo hoarsely. "How can you ask for two lives in return for one?

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!

He longed for the deep as she longed for the night sky and for white lilies floating on water -- although she still tried to convince herself that love alone could feed her soul.

He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her full on the mouth. His skin was wet with rain. When she didn't pull away, he took her face between his hands and kissed her again, on her forehead, on her nose, on her mouth once more. "You will come, won't you? Promisse!" he whispered.

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.

He wants to be grown-up. How different dreams can be! Nature will soon grant your wish.

Hey, don't take this the wrong way, but don't come back, ok?

How fast the ears learned to tell what sounds meant, much faster than it took the eyes to decipher written words.

I always thought it hadn't influenced me very much, but I heard from many people from England that many motives from German fairytales are to be found in my books.

I always wanted to ride a dragon myself, so I decided to do this for a year in my imagination.

I don't like to eat the same dish every day, so I read very different things.

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.

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

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.

I have two Iceland horses, a very hairy dog called Looney, and a guinea pig.

I just did a picture book called The Wildest Brother on Earth, and you will find both of my children in there.

I like a composer called Henry Purcell, and I love to listen to Neil Young.

I like to visit my horse, have a walk with my dog.

I live in Hamburg; that's in the north. And I live on the outskirts of town. It looks like countryside.

I love to read, I love to watch movies, and I love to be with my children.

In love - it sounded like a sickness without any cure, and wasn't that just how it sometimes felt?