Cornelia Funke
Cornelia Funke
Cornelia Maria Funkeis a German author of children's fiction. She was born on December 10, 1958, in Dorsten, North Rhine-Westphalia. Funke is best known for her Inkheart trilogy, published in 2004–2008. Many of her books have now been translated into English. Her work fits mainly into the fantasy and adventure genres. She currently lives in Beverly Hills, California...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 December 1958
CityDorsten, Germany
CountryGermany
So it's happened, I kept thinking, you're in the middle of a story exactly as you've always wanted, and it's horrible. Fear tastes quite different when you're not just reading about it, Meggie, and playing hero wasn't half as much fun as I'd expected.
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.
A library book, I imagine, is a happy book.
Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?
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.
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.
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.
The sea always filled her with longing, though for what she was never sure.
I have a writing chamber stuffed with things children send me and lots of dragons because I collect them, and I look out into the woods from there.
What was a slap for ten pages of escapism, ten pages far from everything that made him unhappy, ten pages of real life instead of the monotony that other people called the real world?
Down there the nights are bright and nobody believes in the Devil.
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.
Hope. Nothing is more intoxicating.
I think we should sometimes read stories where everything's different from our world, don't you agree? There's nothing's like it for teaching us to wonder why trees are green and not red, and why we have five fingers rather than six.' --spoken by The Bluejay, aka Mo the Bookbinder, from 'Inkdeath