Cornelia Funke

All writers are insane!

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you secruity and friendship and didn't ask for anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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__ taste bad, but she was still unhappy.

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

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__ break women. Instead it wore them down, it hollowed them out, very slowly.

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