Fatherhood Quote by Cornelia Funke

The line lands with the casual certainty of a fond confession: addiction, here, isn’t pathology but inheritance. Funke takes a loaded word - “addicts” - and reclaims it as a badge of intimacy, a shared hunger that’s been normalized by love. That’s the quiet rhetorical trick. She makes reading feel less like self-improvement and more like a private family ritual, the kind that shapes a child long before anyone starts talking about “literacy” or “enrichment.”

The specificity does a lot of work. Not “books were important,” not “education mattered,” but a father who “always took me to the library.” The verb “took” implies repetition, effort, and guidance: someone making time, someone mapping a world and inviting a kid to roam it. The library is key because it’s democratic and tactile - a public space where imagination is free, where a child can belong without buying entry. In an era when culture is increasingly subscription-gated, the library reads like an origin story with political undertones: access creates artists.

Subtext-wise, Funke is also sketching a lineage of desire. The father isn’t a disciplinarian pushing “good habits”; he’s a co-conspirator. “We were both” collapses the hierarchy between parent and child into companionship, suggesting that storytelling isn’t something adults dispense but something they still need. Coming from a writer known for building immersive worlds for young readers, it’s an elegant clue to her creative DNA: fantasy as family language, books as the first shared obsession.