The voices / 62 fragments

Cornelia Funke

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Archive entries

01Undated

Because fear kills everything," Mo had once told her. "Your mind, your heart, your imagination.

Cornelia Funke / quote

02Undated

Nothing is more terrifying than fearlessness.

Cornelia Funke / quote

03Undated

-You forgot something important!-What?-It's under my sweater!-WHAT?!-Me!

Cornelia Funke / quote

04Undated

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 / quote

05Undated

She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn’t taste bad, but she was still unhappy.

Cornelia Funke / quote

06Undated

I always used to read aloud to her in the evenings--

Cornelia Funke / quote

07Undated

How ridiculous that water ran out of your eyes when your heart hurt. Tragic heroines in books tended to be amazingly beautiful. Not a word about swollen eyes or a red nose. "Crying always gives me a red nose," thought Elinor. "I expect that's why I'll never be in any book.

Cornelia Funke / quote

08Undated

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

Cornelia Funke / quote

09Undated

.......only the powerful were hated, and that was what he was meant to be in this world.Powerful.

Cornelia Funke / quote

10Undated

You're the one who says books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them...

Cornelia Funke / quote

11Undated

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.

Cornelia Funke / quote

12Undated

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

Cornelia Funke / quote

13Undated

Words,words filled the night like the fragrance of invisible flowers.

Cornelia Funke / quote

14Undated

The night belongs to beasts of prey, and always has. It's easy to forget that when you're indoors, protected by light and solid walls.

Cornelia Funke / quote

15Undated

She wanted to return to her dream. Perhaps it was still somewhere there behind her closed eyelids. Perhaps a little of its happiness still clung like gold dust to her lashes. Don't dreams in fairy tales sometimes leave a token behind?

Cornelia Funke / quote

16Undated

I'm only a kind of book doctor. I can give books new bindings, rejuvenate them a little, stop the bookworms from eating them, and prevent them from losing their pages over the years like a man loses his hair. But inventing the stories in them, filling new, empty pages with right words-- I can't do that. That's a very different trade. A famous writer once wrote, 'An author can be seen as three things: a storyteller, a teacher, or magician-- but a magician, the enchanter, is in the ascendant.

Cornelia Funke / quote

17Undated

When the heart craved something so forcefully, then reason became nothing but helpless observer.

Cornelia Funke / quote

18Undated

All writers are insane!

Cornelia Funke / quote

19Undated

Down there the nights are bright and nobody believes in the Devil.

Cornelia Funke / quote

20Undated

When it came to hiding, even Gwin had nothing to teach Dustfinger. A strange sense of curiosity had always driven him to explore the hidden, forgotten corners of this and any other place, and all that knowledge had now come in useful.

Cornelia Funke / quote

21Undated

What was this yearning, tearing at her insides like hunger and thirst? It couldn't be love. Love was warm and soft, like a bed of leaves. But this was dark, like the shade under a poisonous shrub, and it was hungry. So hungry. It must have some other name, just as there couldn't be the same word for life and death, or for moon and sun

Cornelia Funke / quote

22Undated

Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page any more than they begin on the first page

Cornelia Funke / quote

23Undated

What are stories for if we don't learn from them?

Cornelia Funke / quote

24Undated

I'm perfectly happy to know the world at secondhand. It's a lot safer.

Cornelia Funke / quote