Top 300 Cornelia Funke Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “I know why you’re here... This world doesn’t frighten you half as much as the other one. You have nothing and nobody to lose here. Except Fox, and she clearly worries more about you than you do about her. You’ve left all that could frighten you in the other world. But then Will came here and brought it all with him.”

— Cornelia Funke

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

— Cornelia Funke

154. “It was like a promise that wishes could come true, that desire might lead to more than yearning.”

— Cornelia Funke

155. “The darkness of the world made no distinctions; it entered its palaces as it did its huts.”

— Cornelia Funke

156. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes, Quotes About Stories

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Cornelia Funke

160. “They forked up in the air for him, like trees branching in the night, and rained down sparks. They roared and whispered with their crackling voices, they had danced when he said the word. The flames here were both tame and mutinous, strange, silent beasts that sometimes bit the hand that fed them. Only occasionally, on cold nights when there was nothing but the flames to stave off his loneliness, did he think he heard them calling to him, but they whispered words he didn’t understand.”

— Cornelia Funke

161. “I wish I had more time to visit schools.”

— Cornelia Funke

162. “Fear was like a beast that only grew fiercer when one gave in to it.”

— Cornelia Funke

163. “A story is a labyrinth, it looks as if there were several ways to go, but only one is right, and there’s a nasty surprise ready to punish you for every false step.”

— Cornelia Funke

164. “My son always says I like very weird music.”

— Cornelia Funke

165. “I will try to write books until I drop dead.”

— Cornelia Funke

166. “You can’t expect the wolf to turn vegetarian because of one Pup.”

— Cornelia Funke

167. “Why did such truths only reveal themselves after they’d become lies?”

— Cornelia Funke

168. “Why were love and death such close neighbors?”

— Cornelia Funke

169. “And the pain was back again, and time, and longing too.”

— Cornelia Funke

170. “Didn’t books say that too: that there is always price to pay for happiness?”

— Cornelia Funke

171. “It was hard to let go of love. Once woven, its ribbon was hard to tear, and this one she’d woven quite firmly herself.”

— Cornelia Funke

172. “What was a slap for ten pages of escapism, ten pages far from everything that made him unhappy, ten pages of real life instead of the monotony that other people called the real world?”

— Cornelia Funke

173. “The wheels of the pocket watch began to move in their perfect rhythm, confirming once again that there was no end to well-kept order. Immortality was clean and precise. For sure it didn’t need a heart. A heartbeat became irregular so easily and at the end it stopped, however carefully one treated it.”

— Cornelia Funke

174. “Nobody loves only once.”

— Cornelia Funke

175. “My grandmother told stories; she was very good at that.”

— Cornelia Funke

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

176. “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.”

— Cornelia Funke

177. “We all know what fun it can be to get right into a book and live there for a while, but falling out of a story and suddenly finding yourself in this world doesn’t seem to be much fun at all.”

— Cornelia Funke

Featured in: Fun Quotes

178. “I think we should sometimes read stories where everything’s different from our world, don’t you agree? There’s nothing’s like it for teaching us to wonder why trees are green and not red, and why we have five fingers rather than six.” Of.”

— Cornelia Funke

179. “You humans love mirrors. You have to constantly make sure you still have the same face. Nothing scares you more than if someone changes it.”

— Cornelia Funke

180. “Librarians. He’d never met one with a bad memory. He had a theory that words stuck to their minds like flies to flypaper.”

— Cornelia Funke

181. “Yes, Mo would come. Meggie could think of nothing else as Fenoglio led her away with him, his arm around her as if he could really protect her from Capricorn and Basta and all the others. But he couldn’t. Would Mo be able to protect her? Of course not. He mustn’t come, she thought. Please. Perhaps he won’t be able to find his way in again! He mustn’t come. Yet there was nothing she wanted more, nothing in the whole wide world.”

— Cornelia Funke

182. “There could be few men whose love for a woman had been written on his face with a knife.”

— Cornelia Funke

183. “Power. Like wine when you have it. Like poison when you lose it.”

— Cornelia Funke

184. “The python dropped his head lightly for a moment on Mowgli’s shoulders. “A brave heart and a courteous tongue,” said he. “They shall carry thee far through the jungle, manling.”

— Cornelia Funke

185. “Secrets... nothing eats away at love faster.”

— Cornelia Funke

186. “Her beauty took one’s breath away, like a sudden pain.”

— Cornelia Funke

187. “Life is so simple when you’re young, though of course that’s not what it feels like to the young.”

— Cornelia Funke

188. “I prefer a story that has the good sense to stay on the page where it belongs. – Elinor.”

— Cornelia Funke

189. “Perhaps there’s another, much larger story behind the printed one, a story that changes just as our own world does. And the letters on the page tell us only as much as we’d see peering through a keyhole. Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there’s a whole world that goes on – developing and changing like our own world.”

— Cornelia Funke

190. “Her heart pounded as he kissed her. Or was it his heart? She hadn’t been able to tell the difference ever since he’d freed her from that trap.”

— Cornelia Funke

191. “For Her Ugliness loved stories full of darkness. She didn’t want to be told tales of good fortune and beauty, she liked to hear about death, ugly things, secrets heavy with tears. She wanted her very own world, and it had never heard of beauty and good fortune.”

— Cornelia Funke

192. “She’d been so certain she knew every crevice of his heart, but Jacob was like a country she’d only traveled through halfway.”

— Cornelia Funke

193. “Perhaps the story now goes on beyond the book.”

— Cornelia Funke

194. “Sometimes it’s a good thing we don’t remember things half as well as books do.”

— Cornelia Funke

195. “Whenever he felt the sharp pangs of homesickness he had come back here to his old enemies, where he didn’t feel quite so out of place.”

— Cornelia Funke

196. “Courage was not given; it was acquired, earned. You had to take the difficult paths.”

— Cornelia Funke

197. “She had found him and was bringing back his thanks. Nor did she forget to mention that he had assured her that she was indeed the most beautiful fairy he had ever set eyes on.”

— Cornelia Funke

198. “Where did the love come from? What was it made of?”

— Cornelia Funke

199. “Fox could’ve kissed him on the mouth just to taste the smile on his lips. Forbidden. She’d almost forgotten.”

— Cornelia Funke

200. “Why could she remember nothing but stories of frightened people when Capricorn looked at her? She usually found it so easy to escape somewhere else, to get right inside the minds of people and animals who existed only on paper, so why not now? Because she was afraid. “Because fear kills everything,” Mo had once told her. “Your mind, your heart, your imagination.”

— Cornelia Funke