Life & Wisdom Quote by Cornelia Funke

There is a sly self-portrait tucked inside this line: a grown-up admitting that the most serious work they do happens in the sandbox of the mind. Funke isn’t pitching escapism as a guilty pleasure; she’s framing imagination as a deliberate, time-intensive practice, almost like training for a role. “For a year” matters. It drags fantasy out of the realm of whim and into the territory of craft, discipline, and endurance. The dragon ride isn’t a daydream; it’s a residency.

The intent is both humble and quietly defiant. Funke acknowledges a desire that reality can’t satisfy, then refuses to let that be the end of the story. Instead of treating “I always wanted” as childish, she treats it as data: a creative need worth honoring. The subtext is a manifesto for fiction writers, especially those working in children’s literature where “imagination” is often patronized as cute rather than potent. She’s saying the job is to simulate the impossible with enough sensory conviction that it becomes emotionally true.

Contextually, Funke’s work (not least the Inkheart universe, with its porous boundary between books and life) is obsessed with what stories do to the body: they accelerate the pulse, sharpen fear, spark courage. The dragon here is shorthand for scale - awe, risk, freedom - and her method is telling. She doesn’t claim she conquered a dragon; she claims she lived alongside the longing until it turned into narrative. That’s the magic trick: converting private desire into a shared ride.