Cornelia Funke Quotes

Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.

When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.

Everyone has ways of trying to find a way to memorise our past. There's something very poetic about that.

If you gave me an hour in the day between '09 and '14, I could have told you exactly where I was and what I was doing.

When I went to Munich, I was perhaps a little too young.

Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.

Old books exert a strange fascination for me -- their smell, their feel, their history; wondering who might have owned them, how they lived, what they felt.

There is something wonderful about a book. We can pick it up. We can heft it. We can read it. We can set it down. We can think of what we have read. It does something for us. We can share great minds, great actions, and great undertakings in the pages of a book.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this: A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.

I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

The past is one evil less and one memory more.

So here I sit in the early candle-light of old age-I and my book-casting backward glances over out travel'd road.

Sometimes it's a good thing we don't remember things half as well as books do.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

I never thought I could write this much and now that it's coming to an end, I feel sad that I have to stop, sort of the way you feel at the end of a really good book and you know you're going to miss the main character. But in this case, the main character is me! Myself. Joe (formerly JoDan) Bunch. —Joe Bunch

What one knows best is ... what one has learned not from books but as a result of books, through the reflections to which they have given rise.

People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory.

No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books.

Clothing is . . . an exercise in memory. It makes me explore the past: how did I feel when I wore that. They are like signposts in the search for the past.

I'm surprised by how much I remember.

I said: I must remember this, being small.

There is no past, as long as books shall live. Books make the past our heritage and our home.