Parenting & Family Quote by Cornelia Funke

Funke turns the fantasy of being a book into a quietly radical wish about access. Not a rare first edition kept behind glass, not a pristine gift-book that sits on a shelf like decor, but a library copy: handled, overdue, smudged, repaired with tape. She’s choosing circulation over reverence, the kind of value that’s measured in fingerprints. The line lands because it treats “worn” as proof of love, not damage.

The emotional engine is in “taken home.” Reading is framed as adoption, temporary but intimate, and the book’s dream is to belong to many households without ever being owned. That’s a pointed alternative to the consumer version of childhood literacy, where stories arrive through purchases, subscriptions, or algorithmic recommendations. Funke’s imagined afterlife depends on public infrastructure: librarians, budgets, the unglamorous logistics of lending. The subtext is that stories should not be gated by income, taste, or parental cultural capital.

“All different sorts of kids” does a lot of work, too. It’s an unshowy nod to the plural childhoods a library serves: kids with crowded apartments, kids who are new to a language, kids who need quiet, kids who need escape. Funke, long associated with meta-stories about the power of books, stakes that power in a democratic setting. The quote flatters no one; it gently pressures adults to keep the commons intact. A library book is a small object that proves a big civic claim: imagination is something we fund together.