Helene Hanff Quotes

#1. Why should I run all the way down to 17th St. to buy dirty, badly made books whenI can buy clean, beautiful ones
from you without leaving the typewriter? From whereI sit,London's a lot closer than 17th Street.

Helene Hanff

#2. 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

#3. I am going to bed. i will have nightmares involving huge monsters in academic robes carrying long bloody butcher knives labeled Excerpt, Selection, Passage, and Abridged.

Helene Hanff

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. I houseclean my books every spring and throw out those I'm never going to read again like I throw out clothes I'm never going to wear again.

Helene Hanff

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

Helene Hanff

#8. All my scripts have artistic backgrounds
ballet, concert hall, opera
and all the suspects and corpses are cultured, maybe I'll do one about the rare book business in your honor, do you want to be the murderer or the corpse?

Helene Hanff

#9. I enclose two limp singles, i will make do with this thing till you find me a real Pepys. THEN i will rip up this ersatz book, page be page, AND WRAP THINGS IN IT.

Helene Hanff

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. Buying a book you've never read is like buying a dress you've never tried on

Helene Hanff

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

Helene Hanff

#14. WILL YOU TELL MEGAN WELLS SHE IS OUT OF HER COTTONPICKING MIND? if she's that bored with civilization why doesn't she just move to a siberian salt mine?

Helene Hanff

#15. 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

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

Helene Hanff

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

Helene Hanff

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

Helene Hanff

#19. I go through life watching the english language being raped before me face, like miniver cheevy, i was born too late.
and like miniver cheevy i cough and call it fate and go on drinking.

Helene Hanff

#20. 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

#21. You leave me sitting here writing long margin notes in library books that don't belong to me, some day they'll find out i did it and take my library card away.

Helene Hanff

#22. 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.'
Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. Looking around the rug one thing's for sure: it's here.

Helene Hanff

#23. I've been sitting on the edge of the bed for an hour in a complete daze. I told him if I die tonight I'll die happy, it's all here, everything's here.

Helene Hanff

#24. I love him to death, there's an Edwardian finishing touch to everything he does.

Helene Hanff

#25. 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

#26. 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 realise I can recite pages 21 and 22 from memory. Then I put the book away for a few years.

Helene Hanff

#27. I never overcame my conviction that writing for commercial television was a kind of prostitution.

Helene Hanff

#28. 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

#29. All my life I've wanted to see London. [ ... ] I wanted to see London the way old people want to see home before they die.

Helene Hanff

#30. 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

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

Helene Hanff

#32. All that gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs in the pine-panelled library of an English country home; it wants to be read by the fire in a gentleman's leather easy chair--not on a secondhand studio couch in a one-room hovel in a broken-down brownstone front.

Helene Hanff

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

Helene Hanff

#34. 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