Alessandra > Alessandra's Quotes

“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.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

“The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real ... for a moment at least ... that long magic moment before we wake.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to middle Earth.”
― George R.R. Martin

“Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Hope. Nothing is more intoxicating.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath

“A reader doesn't really see the characters in a story; he feels them.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath

“Nothing is more frightening than a fear you cannot name.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“You know a great many things in dreams, often despite the evidence of your eyes. You just know them.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“Sometimes it's a good thing we don't remember things half as well as books do.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“Writing stories is a kind of magic, too.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“Sometimes, when you're so sad you don't know what to do, it helps to be angry.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“The sea always filled her with longing, though for what she was never sure.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“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, Inkdeath

“It's a good idea to have your own books with you in a strange place”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“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.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

“Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask for anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly. Love, truth, beauty, wisdom and consolation against death. Who had said that? Someone else who loved books.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“Because fear kills everything," Mo had once told her. "Your mind, your heart, your imagination.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“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.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart / Inkspell / Inkdeath

“So what? All writers are lunatics!”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

“Books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“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.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell