Cornelia Funke

“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!”

“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.”

“For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his last punishment, let the flames of hell consume him for ever.Curse on book thieves, from the monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain”

“Life was more difficult in Inkheart, yet it seemed to Meggie that with every new day Fenoglio's story was spinning a magic spell around her heart, sticky as a spider's web and enchantingly beautiful..”

“Quite suddenly Meggie felt fear rise in her like black brackish water, she felt lost, terribly lost, she felt it in every part of her. She didn't belong here! What had she done?”

“So what? All writers are lunatics!”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Let's be off before he gets his great horsey teeth into my poor lines of verse!”

“This book taught me, once and for all, how easily you can escape this world with the help of words! You can find friends between the pages of a book, wonderful friends.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Vielleicht war er ja noch da, irgendwo hinter ihren geschlossenen Lidern, vielleicht klebte ja noch etwas Glueck an ihren Wimpern, wie Goldstaub. Liessen Traeume in den Maerchen nicht manchmal so ertwas zurueck?”

“Wie es so schoen bei Shakespeare heisst: “Jeder spielt seine Rolle, und meine ist eine traurige.”

“… Aber diesesmal war ihre eigene Geschichte zu stark, um sich von der erfundenen vertreiben zu lassen.”

“Manchmal ist es schon praktisch, dass unser Gedaechtnis nicht halb so gut ist wie das der Buecher, ohne sie wuessten wir vermutlich gar nichts mehr.”

“Buecher muessen schwer sein, weil die ganze Welt in ihnen steckt!”

“Das Buch wird anfangen, deine Erinnerungen zu sammeln. Du wirst es spaeter nur aufschlagen muessen und schon wirst du wieder dort sein, wo du zuerst darin gelesen hast. An nichts haften Erinnerungen so gut wie an bedruckten Seiten.”

“Wie gross kleine Geraeusche in der Stille werden.”

“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.”