Top 300 Cornelia Funke Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The truth’s not pretty of course. No one likes to look it in the face.”

— Cornelia Funke

102. “It’s the same in real life: Notorious murderers get off scot-free and live happily all their lives, while good people die – sometimes the very best people. That’s the way of the world.”

— Cornelia Funke

103. “Ten minutes can be a long time when you’re waiting with a beating heart for something you don’t understand, something you don’t really want to know.”

— Cornelia Funke

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

— Cornelia Funke

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

— Cornelia Funke

106. “Life seemed so much stronger than death, death so much stronger than life. Like the ebb and flow of the tide.”

— Cornelia Funke

107. “The rain pummeled the old Dragon bones as though to provide the rhythm to the song of their mortality, but death was not what they had on their minds – or wasn’t love sometimes called the small death?”

— Cornelia Funke

108. “My voice had bayou gut them slipping out of their story like a bookmark forgotten by a reader between the pages.”

— Cornelia Funke

109. “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

110. “The Fairy looked at the broken glass around her feet. Her shattered cage. And the one who’d put her in it was far, far away. But, no, she had caged herself.”

— Cornelia Funke

111. “Look at your daughter,′ she whispered. ‘As brave as... as... ” She wanted to compare Meggie to a hero in some story but all the heroes she could think of were men, and anyway none of them seemed to her brave enough for comparison to the girl standing there, perfectly straight, scrutinizing Capricorn’s Black Jackets, with her chin jutting out defiantly.”

— Cornelia Funke

112. “The book she had been reading was under her pillow, pressing its cover against her ear as if to lure her back into its printed pages.”

— Cornelia Funke

113. “Second, there are so many magical places in books that you cant go to, like Hogwarts and Middle Earth, so I wanted to set a story in a place where children can actually go.”

— Cornelia Funke

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

— Cornelia Funke

115. “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!”

— Cornelia Funke

116. “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.”

— Cornelia Funke

117. “Although we may wish for it, true magic is a scary thing.”

— Cornelia Funke

118. “You make peace with one sister only to declare war on the other. It’s always like that with peace, isn’t it? Always to someone’s detriment, already sowing the seed for the next war.”

— Cornelia Funke

119. “And I plan to write a sequel to Dragon Rider.”

— Cornelia Funke

120. “The Dark Fairy touched her chest. No heart, like her sisters. So where did the love come from?”

— Cornelia Funke

121. “My children were all made from paper and printer’s ink...”

— Cornelia Funke

122. “Perhaps, after all, this world was made of dreams, and an old man had merely found the words for them.”

— Cornelia Funke

123. “Sometimes we think we know people at first sight,” he said. “As though we’d met them a hundred times before, in another life, in another world. And then we realize that we know nothing. How did they look as children? What dreams startle them from their sleep?”

— Cornelia Funke

124. “All writers are insane!”

— Cornelia Funke

125. “Every book should begin with attractive endpapers,′ he had once told Meggie. ‘Preferably in a dark color: dark red or dark blue depending on the binding. When you open the book it’s like going to the theater. First you see the curtain. Then it’s pulled aside and the show begins.”

— Cornelia Funke

126. “Mortimer’s face twisted when the Piper pressed his knife against his ribs. Oh yes, he’s obviously made the wrong enemies in this story, thought Orpheus. And the wrong friends. But that was high-minded heroes for you. Stupid.”

— Cornelia Funke

127. “So it’s happened, I kept thinking, you’re in the middle of a story exactly as you’ve always wanted, and it’s horrible. Fear tastes quite different when you’re not just reading about it, Meggie, and playing hero wasn’t half as much fun as I’d expected.”

— Cornelia Funke

128. “Love didn’t deserve the nice reputation it had.”

— Cornelia Funke

129. “I libri amavano tutti coloro che li aprivano, offrivano protezione e amicizia senza pretendere nulla in cambio. Non ti abbandonavano mai, nemmeno quando li maltrattavi.”

— Cornelia Funke

130. “They’re all cruel,′ he said. ‘The world I come from, the world you come from, and this one, too. Maybe the people don’t see the cruelty in your world right away, it’s better hidden, but it’s there all the same.”

— Cornelia Funke

131. “The night breathed through the apartment like a dark animal. The ticking of a clock. The groan of a floorboard as he slipped out of his room. All was drowned by its silence. But Jacob loved the night. He felt it on his skin like a promise. Like a cloak woven from freedom and danger.”

— Cornelia Funke

132. “Truth or lie... he had always chosen the lie, to spare his little brother any unpleasant truth.”

— Cornelia Funke

133. “No one saw firedrake as he made his escape along the canal.”

— Cornelia Funke

134. “I remember the feeling. Whenever my father got so absorbed in a book that we might have been in visible I felt like taking a pair of scissors and cutting it up.”

— Cornelia Funke

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

— Cornelia Funke

136. “Sometimes Dustfinger thought Basta’s constant fear of curses and sudden disaster probably arose from his terror of the darkness within himself, which made him assume that the rest of the world must be exactly the same.”

— Cornelia Funke

137. “Maybe love bore fruit even more poisonous than fear.”

— Cornelia Funke

138. “Fear was not red, fear is pale as a dead man’s face.”

— Cornelia Funke

139. “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

140. “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

141. “She’d fallen in love with the wrong boy. But when did love ever bother about that?”

— Cornelia Funke

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

— Cornelia Funke

143. “Dustfinger closed his eyes and listened. He was home again.”

— Cornelia Funke

144. “It was far easier to believe in unhappiness than in happiness.”

— Cornelia Funke

145. “My darling,” she said at last, “are you sure you don’t mind being a mouse for the rest of your life?” “I don’t mind at all,” I said. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like so long as somebody loves you.”

— Cornelia Funke

146. “The stars shone down on her like flowers made of light, and their beauty hurt her weary heart.”

— Cornelia Funke

147. “No prince had lived in those wretched hovels, no red-robed bishops, only farmers and laborers whose stories no one had written down, and now they were lost, buried under wild thyme and fast growing spurge.”

— Cornelia Funke

148. “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.”

— Cornelia Funke

149. “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

150. “The Weaver wove herself from the thread of night, hair of moonlight, skin of stars. So old. Without beginning or end.”

— Cornelia Funke