Helene Hanff Quotes

• Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.

  Helene Hanff

  Book, Long, Relax

  48 Copy quote

• I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.

  Helene Hanff

  Reading, Long, Attention

  18 Copy quote

• If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.

  Helene Hanff

  Kissing, Crosses, Happens

  18 Copy quote

• What fortune teller would ever have had the nerve to predict that the best years of my life would turn out to be my old age?

  Helene Hanff

  Years, Age, Nerves

  5 Copy quote

• My problem is that while other people are reading fifty books I'm reading one book fifty times. I only stop when at the bottom of page 20, say, I realize I can recite pages 21 and 22 from memory. Then I put the book away for a few years.

  Helene Hanff

  Memories, Book, Reading

  12 Copy quote

• I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest.

  Helene Hanff

  Book, Pages, Owners

  6 Copy quote

• Why is it that people who wouldn't dream of stealing anything else think it's perfectly all right to steal books?

  Helene Hanff

  Dream, Book, Thinking

  14 Copy quote

• Talent is the infinite capacity for taking pains. Genius is the infinite capacity for achievement without taking any pains at all.

  Helene Hanff

  Pain, Achievement, Genius

  10 Copy quote

• And for at least that moment, I wouldn't have traded the hundreds of books I've read for the few I know almost by heart.

  Helene Hanff

  Book, Heart, Moments

  14 Copy quote

• I wanted to see London the way old people want to see home before they die.

  Helene Hanff

  Home, People, Want

  "The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street".

  14 Copy quote

• Fact One: Cataract surgery is simple, painless and (except with implants) risk free ... the whole procedure is common, routine and nothing to worry about. Fact Two: Fact One applies only to cataracts on the eyes in somebody else's head.

  Helene Hanff

  Eye, Simple, Two

  8 Copy quote

• Did I tell you I finally found the perfect page-cutter? It's a pearl-handled fruit knife. My mother left me a dozen of them, I keep one in the pencil cup on my desk. Maybe I go with the wrong kind of people but i'm just not likely to have twelve guests all sitting around simultaneously eating fruit.

  Helene Hanff

  Mother, Knives, People

  4 Copy quote

• I'll have mine [The Book-Lovers' Anthology] till the day I die - and die happy in the knowledge that I'm leaving it behind for someone else to love. I shall sprinkle pale pencil marks through it pointing out the best passages to some book-lover yet unborn.

  Helene Hanff

  Book, Leaving, Sprinkles

  7 Copy quote

• But I don't know, maybe it's just as well I never got there. I dreamed about it for so many years. I used to go to English movies just to look at the streets. I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I'd go looking for the England of English Literature, and he nodded and said: "It's there.

  Helene Hanff

  Years, People, Guy

  4 Copy quote

• It looks too new and pristine ever to have been read by anyone else, but it has been: it keeps falling open at the most delightful places as the ghost of its former owner points me to things I've never read before.

  Helene Hanff

  Fall, Looks, Ghost

  4 Copy quote

• I have these guilts about never having read Chaucer but I was talked out of learning Early Anglo-Saxon / Middle English by a friend who had to take it for her Ph.D. They told her to write an essay in Early Anglo-Saxon on any-subject-of-her-own-choosing. “Which is all very well,” she said bitterly, “but the only essay subject you can find enough Early Anglo-Saxon words for is ‘How to Slaughter a Thousand Men in a Mead Hall’.

  Helene Hanff

  Writing, Men, Guilt

  5 Copy quote

• I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to "I hate to read new books," and I hollered "Comrade!" to whoever owned it before me.

  Helene Hanff

  Hate, Book, Pages

  8 Copy quote

• I despair of ever getting it through anybody's head I am not interested in bookshops, I am interested in what's written in the books. I don't browse in bookshops, I browse in libraries, where you can take a book home and read it, and if you like it you go to a bookshop and buy it.

  Helene Hanff

  Book, Home, Despair

  8 Copy quote

• It's against my principles to buy a book I haven't read, it's like buying a dress you haven't tried on.

  Helene Hanff

  Book, Principles, Dresses

  7 Copy quote

• Hollywood isn't a place, it's a way of life.

  Helene Hanff

  Hollywood, Way

  7 Copy quote

• I find the treatment of royalty distinctly peculiar. The royal family lives in palaces heavily screened from prying eyes by fences, grounds, gates, guards, all designed to ensure the family absolute privacy. And every newspaper in London carried headlines announcing PRINCESS ANNE HAS OVARIAN CYST REMOVED. I mean you're a young girl reared in heavily guarded seclusion and every beer drinker in every pub knows the precise state of your ovaries.

  Helene Hanff

  Girl, Princess, Eye

  5 Copy quote

• I wish you hadn't been so over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf. It's the bookseller coming out in you all, you were afraid you'd decrease its value. You would have increased it for the present owner. (And possibly for the future owner. I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.)

  Helene Hanff

  Reading, Long, Wish

  4 Copy quote

• I liked reading about the nun who ate so dainty with her fingers she never dripped any grease on herself. I've never been able to make that claim and I use a fork.

  Helene Hanff

  Reading, Grease, Use

  7 Copy quote

• History, as they say, is alive and well and living in London.

  Helene Hanff

  Alive, London, Wells

  12 Copy quote

• I personally can't think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.

  Helene Hanff

  Book, Thinking, Mediocre

  4 Copy quote

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