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.

— Cornelia Funke

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.

— Cornelia Funke

I'm perfectly happy to know the world at secondhand. It's a lot safer.

— Cornelia Funke

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

It's a good idea to have your own books with you in a strange place

— Cornelia Funke

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

— Cornelia Funke

It was a chilly morning after the night's rain, and the sun hung in the sky like a pale coin lost by someone high up in the clouds.

— Cornelia Funke

I will try to write books until I drop dead.

— Cornelia Funke

Killing is easy," said Mo, "Dying is harder...

— Cornelia Funke

Maggie thought this first whisper sounded a little different from one book to another, depending on weather or not she already knew the story it was going to tell her.

— Cornelia Funke