Life & Wisdom Quote by Cornelia Funke

Memory is doing double duty here: it’s praise, but it’s also origin myth. Cornelia Funke’s line is almost aggressively plain, and that’s the point. “My grandmother told stories” is a small domestic fact, not a grand literary claim; “she was very good at that” lands like a child’s verdict, the kind that trusts felt experience over credentials. Funke, a writer whose work often defends imagination as a survival skill, frames storytelling as something you inherit through intimacy, not institutions.

The intent is modesty with teeth. By refusing ornate language, Funke quietly elevates oral tradition and family narration as serious craft. “Very good” signals expertise without pretension, implying that the standards that matter aren’t academic ones but the listener’s absorption: attention held, fear managed, wonder sparked. The subtext: stories didn’t enter her life as “literature.” They arrived as a relationship.

Context matters, too. Funke is German, raised in a culture with deep fairy-tale and folktale roots, where “grandmother stories” aren’t just sentimental props but conduits for archetypes, moral ambiguity, and the pleasurable darkness of myth. In that light, the grandmother becomes a first editor, first performer, first proof that narrative can make a room feel bigger than its walls.

There’s also a quiet politics in the attribution. Funke credits a woman’s unpaid, often invisible labor - the domestic art of keeping children transfixed - as formative. It’s an understated rebuke to the idea that culture only comes from famous names. Here, the canon starts on the couch.