Life & Wisdom Quote by Cornelia Funke

Everything gets to me reads like a confession and a craft note at once: a writer admitting she has porous boundaries. Cornelia Funke, best known for Inkheart and other fantasy that treats books as living ecosystems, isn’t selling toughness or ironic distance. She’s staking a claim that sensitivity is not a flaw to overcome but a tool to work with, even a moral stance. In a culture that rewards the “unbothered” persona, “gets to me” quietly refuses the performance of invulnerability. It’s blunt, almost childlike phrasing, which matters: it suggests instinct over posture.

The second sentence tightens the lens. “I’m very sentimental” can sound like a self-deprecating shrug, but it also reframes sentimentality as attention to attachment: to objects, stories, people, endings. Funke’s fiction runs on that fuel. Her worlds aren’t powered by cynical worldbuilding; they’re powered by the ache of what’s cherished and therefore at risk. Sentimentality, in this context, is a narrative engine. If everything gets to you, then everything has stakes. A lost page, a broken promise, a parent’s absence, a character’s death: none of it is “just” plot. It lands.

There’s subtext, too, about the author’s job. To write for children and teens without condescension, you have to remember what grown-ups are trained to forget: small things feel enormous when you’re learning the world. Funke’s line defends that scale of feeling. She’s telling you why her stories hurt, heal, and linger: because she lets the world in, and then she makes a room for it on the page.