Quotes from Cornelia Funke

Raramente o mal se mostra de imediato. A princípio, é pouco mais que um sussurro. Um olhar. Uma traição. Mas logo cresce e cria raízes, mesmo que imperceptível, despercebido.

Carmen Cardoso acreditava no conto de fadas mais perigoso de todos: o do príncipe que a salvaria.

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.

You know what they say: When people start burning books they'll soon burn human beings.

a book always keeps something of its owner between its pages.

Blue as the evening sky, blue as cranesbill flowers, blue as the lips of drowned men and the heart of a blaze burning with too hot a flame. Yes, sometimes it was hot in this world, too. Hot and cold, light and dark, terrible and beautiful, it was everything all at once. It wasn't true that you felt nothing in the land of Death. You felt and heard and smelled and saw, but your heart remained strangely calm, as if it were resting before the dance began again. Peace. Was that the word?

Nothing is more terrifying than fearlessness.

Mo could paint pictures in the empty air with his voice alone.

All writers are insane!

I pledge to set out to live a thousand lives between printed pages. I pledge to use books as doors to other minds, old and young, girl and boy, man and animal. I pledge to use books to open windows to a thousand different worlds and to the thousand different faces of my own world. I pledge to use books to make my universe spread much wider than the world I live in every day. I pledge to treat my books like friends, visiting them all from time to time and keeping them close.

What on earth have you packed in here? Bricks? asked Mo as he carried Meggie's book-box out of the house. You're the one who says books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them, said Meggie.

Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.

Words were useless. At times, they might sound wonderful, but they let you down the moment you really needed them. You could never find the right words, never, and where would you look for them? The heart is as silent as a fish, however much the tongue tries to give it a voice.

She always did like tales of adventure-stories full of brightness and darkness. She could tell you the names of all King Arthur's knights, and she knew everything about Beowulf and Grendel, the ancient gods and the not-quite-so-ancient heroes. She liked pirate stories, too, but most of all she loved books that had at least a knight or a dragon or a fairy in them. She was always on the dragon's side by the way.

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

I wish you luck,' she said, kissing him on the cheek. He still had the most beautiful eyes of any boy she'd ever seen. But now her heart beat so much faster for someone else.

Why did death make life taste so much sweeter? Why could the heart love only what it could also lose?

My children were all made from paper and printer's ink...

Because by now Elinor had understood this, too: A longing for books was nothing compared with what you could feel for human beings. The books told you about that feeling. The books spoke of love, and it was wonderful to listen to them, but they were no substitute for love itself. They couldn't kiss her like Meggie, they couldn't hug her like Resa, they couldn't laugh like Mortimer. Poor books, poor Elinor.

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.

Books are like flypaper, memories cling to the printed pages better than anything else.

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

In love - it sounded like a sickness without any cure, and wasn't that just how it sometimes felt?

It [the book] was spinning a magic spell around her heart, sticky as a spider's web and enchantingly beautiful..