Quotes from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“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, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“A thousand enemies outside the house are better than one within. Arab proverb”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“Everyone living around this lake thinks I’m crazy, and if we go back to the police with this story, then the news that Elinor Loredan has finally flipped will be all over the place. Which just goes to show that a passion for books is extremely unhealthy.”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“Oh, if you’re a bird, be an early bird And catch the worm for your breakfast plate. If you’re a bird, be an early bird But if you’re a worm, sleep late.”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“The books in Mo and Meggie’s house were stacked under tables, on chairs, in the corners of the rooms. There were books in the kitchen and books in the lavatory. Books on the TV set and in the closet, small piles of books, tall piles of books, books thick and thin, books old and new. They welcomed Meggie down to breakfast with invitingly opened pages; they kept boredom at bay when the weather was bad. And sometimes you fell over them. “He’s just standing there!” whispered Meggie, leading Mo into her room. “Has he got a hairy face? If so he could be a werewolf.” “Oh, stop it!” Meggie looked at him sternly, although his jokes made her feel less scared. Already, she hardly believed anymore in the figure standing in the rain—until she knelt down again at the window. “There! Do you see him?” she whispered. Mo looked out through the raindrops running down the”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“Nichts war grausamer als ein Herz aus Fleisch und Blut, weil es wusste, was Schmerzen bereitet.”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“After all,” she said, “many people here have little enough patience or understanding for their fellow human beings who are only superficially different than them—so how would it be for little people with blue skins who can fly?”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“My darling,” she said at last, “are you sure you don’t mind being a mouse for the rest of your life?” “I don’t mind at all,” I said. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like so long as somebody loves you.”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“Look. (Grown-ups skip this paragraph.) I’m not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending, I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there’s a lot of bad stuff coming. William Goldman, The Princess Bride”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with weary feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“In books I meet the dead as if they were alive, in books I see what is yet to come … All things decay and pass with time … all fame would fall victim to oblivion if God had not given mortal men the book to aid them.”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“There is a sort of busy worm, That will the fairest book deform. Their tasteless tooth will tear and taint The poet, patriot, sage or saint, Nor sparing wit nor learning. Now, if you’d know the reason why, The best of reasons I’ll supply: ’Tis bread to the poor vermin. J. Doraston, quoted by W. Blades”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“night.” “Sometimes, yes,” Meggie had said. “But it only works for children.” Which made Mo tweak her nose. Mo. Meggie had never called her father anything else. That night—when so much began and so many things changed forever—Meggie had one of her favorite books under her pillow, and since the rain wouldn’t let her sleep she sat up, rubbed the drowsiness from her eyes, and took it out. Its pages rustled promisingly when she opened it. Meggie thought this first whisper sounded a little different from one book to another, depending on whether or not she already knew the story it was going to tell her. But she needed light. She had a box of matches hidden in the drawer of her bedside table. Mo had forbidden her to light candles at night. He didn’t like fire. “Fire devours books,” he always said, but she was twelve years old, she surely could be trusted to keep an eye on a couple of candle flames. Meggie loved to read by candlelight. She had five candlesticks on the windowsill, and she was just holding the lighted match to one of the black wicks when she heard footsteps outside. She blew out the match in alarm—oh, how well she remembered it, even many years later—and knelt to look out of the window, which was wet with rain. Then she saw him. The rain cast a kind of pallor on the darkness, and the stranger was little more than a shadow. Only his face gleamed white as he looked up at Meggie. His hair clung to his wet forehead. The rain was falling on him, but he ignored it. He stood there motionless, arms crossed over his chest as if that might at least warm him a little. And he kept on staring at the house. I must go and wake Mo, thought Meggie. But she stayed put, her heart thudding, and went on gazing out into the night as if the stranger’s stillness had infected her. Suddenly, he turned his head, and Meggie felt as if he were looking straight into her eyes. She shot off the bed so fast the open book fell to the floor, and she ran barefoot out into the dark corridor. This was the end of May, but it was chilly in the old house. There was still a light on in Mo’s room. He often stayed up reading late into the night. Meggie had inherited her love of books from her father. When she took refuge from a bad dream with him, nothing could lull her to sleep better than Mo’s calm breathing beside her and the sound of the pages turning. Nothing chased nightmares away faster than”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“The python dropped his head lightly for a moment on Mowgli’s shoulders. “A brave heart and a courteous tongue,” said he. “They shall carry thee far through the jungle, manling.”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“Perhaps she was more like him than he’d thought: Her home, too, had consisted of paper and printer’s ink. She probably felt as lost as he did in the real world.”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“widened greedily, Meggie concluded they could only be discussing a book,”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“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.” He”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails … and when at last he goeth to his last punishment, let the flames of hell consume him for ever. Curse on book thieves, from the monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain T”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“Although it’s not just plants and animals that die out, so do books. Quite often, I’m sorry to say. I’m sure you could fill a hundred houses like this one to the roof with all the books that have disappeared forever.”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“I libri devono essere pesanti perché dentro hanno il mondo intero.”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“Faccio volentieri delle promesse, specialmente quelle che non posso mantenere.”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“La paura ha tutto un altro sapore quando la si vive dal vero, Meggie, e giocare all’eroe non era così divertente come mi ero immaginato.”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“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”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“Nothing chased nightmares away faster than the rustle of printed paper. But”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“«Cara Elinor, evidentemente lei è nata nella storia sbagliata» osservò Dita di Polvere. Erano le prime parole che pronunciava dall’inizio del viaggio.
«Nella storia sbagliata? Vorrà dire nell’epoca sbagliata. Sì, anch’io l’ho pensato spesso».
«La chiami un po’ come le pare» replicò lui.”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“Il punto è che credi troppo volentieri a ciò che vuoi credere.”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

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Popular quotes

“أنا لست قادرا علي قتل رجل , لكن الطاغية ليس رجلا إنما هو طاغية”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from A Man

“It was more than a spider. It was every unknown terror in the world fused into wriggling, poison-jawed horror. It was every anxiety, insecurity, and fear in his life given a hideous, night-black form.”
― Richard Matheson, quote from The Shrinking Man

“As Zacharias approached his conveyance, the scope of the undertaking to which he had agreed began to dawn upon him.

The chaise that was to bear him and Prunella to Fobdown Purlieu was indeed waiting. It was doubtful whether it was capable of doing anything else.

Turrill was a good-humoured man on the whole, whose anxieties about driving the Sorcerer Royal had been eased by Mr. Wythe’s being as pleasant-spoken and openhanded a gentleman as he had ever met (“Even if he is black as coal, I am sure that is none of his fault, and it would be a dull world if God had cut us all from the same pattern”). It was no wonder he felt hardly used upon this occasion, however, and Zacharias was not surprised to be addressed in terms of reproach.

“You hadn’t ought to have done it, sir,” said the coachman. “You may turn me into a frog for it, but I must speak my mind, and I say you hadn’t ought to have done it. If I had not given satisfaction, you had only to say the word and I should have hopped to it, not wishing to offend any gentleman of such a liberal disposition as yourself, and not being such a fool as to desire to vex a sorcerer besides. There was no call to go a-magicking the chaise—and where you got the squashes for it out of season, I am sure I don’t know.”

“Neither do I,” said Zacharias, bending down to examine what had previously been a wheel, and was now an enormous squash.”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown

“Right as my eyes were about to move onto the next photo in the sequence, they froze and focused on something that vexed me so powerfully that I can now, as I write this, distinctly remember feeling dizzy and capable of only a single, repeating thought. Why am I in this picture?”
― quote from Penpal

“If your spirit is not fit to see the Simurgh, neither will your heart be a bright mirror, fit to reflect him. It is true that no eye is able to contemplate and marvel at his beauty, not is it capable of understanding; one cannot feel towards the Simurgh as one feels towards the beauty of this world. But by his abounding grace he has given us a mirror to reflect himself, and this mirror is the heart. Look into your heart and there you will see his image.”
― Farid ud-Din Attar, quote from The Conference of the Birds

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About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.