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
You know what they say: When people start burning books they'll soon burn human beings.
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.
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.
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 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.
She pressed her hand against her chest. No heart. So where did the love she felt come from?
She wanted to return to her dream. Perhaps it was still somewhere there behind her closed eyelids. Perhaps a little of its happiness still clung like gold dust to her lashes. Don't dreams in fairy tales sometimes leave a token behind?
She is a real bookworm. I think she lives on print. Her whole house is full of books - looks as if she likes them better than human company.
Please," she whispered as she opened the book, "please get me out of here just for an hour or so, please take me far, far away
All books are in safe hands with me. They're my children, my inky children, and I look after them well. I keep the sunlight away from their pages, I dust and protect them from hungry hookworms and grubby human fingers.
So what? All writers are lunatics!
You know, it's a funny thing about writers. Most people don't stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago--they don't expect to meet them in the street or out shopping. They know their stories but not their names, and certainly not their faces. And most writers like it that way.
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.