Top 70 Hanff's Quotes
#1. The first time I went to Helene Hanff's apartment at 305 East 72nd Street, it was 1977, and I was a 16-year-old girl who wanted to be a writer.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#2. Naturally, no march on Washington would be complete without its counter-demonstration.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#3. I was 11 years old and horse-obsessed. New York City was an unfortunate place for a girl like me to be growing up.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#4. A successful birth is not a birth without drugs or monitors or surgery. A successful birth is when you're alive and the baby's alive.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. I never overcame my conviction that writing for commercial television was a kind of prostitution.
Helene Hanff
#8. I made it to London aged six, an event I recorded in my diary with coloured markers to convey my sense of occasion. And in 1983, after graduating from college, I returned to spend two years at Cambridge University.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#9. 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
#10. Want of a better idea, she washed her face with the available hand soap and dried
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#11. 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
#12. I love him to death, there's an Edwardian finishing touch to everything he does.
Helene Hanff
#13. When you get right down to it, there's something uniquely satisfying in being gripped by a great plot, in begrudging whatever real-world obligations might prevent you from finding out what happens next.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#14. 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
#15. Every so often in life, you encounter a brilliant idea. Usually, at least in my case, it's somebody else's idea.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#16. The implication of AKC registration is that a dog who has it is better than a dog who hasn't.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#17. 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
#18. Did I become a theater person right then, sitting in the Imperial Theater, waiting for the high piccolo note at the start of 'Pippin'? Maybe.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#19. I say that glorious prose is a fine and laudable thing, but without an enthralling story, it's just so much verbal tapioca. Simply put, the best books have both, and the best writers disparage neither.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#20. I actually think there are lots of good matches for each person, and they cross our paths all the time, but we're so wedded to the idea of love at first sight that we can miss the really great people who don't come with a thunderbolt attached.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#23. 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
#24. A good story, a story resonant and remarkable, can be remade endlessly to tell new sides of itself for new generations of readers.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#25. History, as they say, is alive and well and living in London.
Helene Hanff
#26. I started thinking about what I've always been interested in: how people can't see things that are right in front of them. All you have to do is read the papers to see endless examples of smart people who can't see the nose on their faces.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#27. As a writer, I have this compulsion to take characters who appear formidable and bombard them with adversity until they crumble. What's interesting is watching them rise again, and seeing how they've changed and grown, if indeed they have.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#28. She lacked the sheen of money, muscular good health, good skin, good clothes.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#29. 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
#30. The Thames could be thought of as England's longest archaeological site, and no fewer than 90,000 objects recovered from its foreshore are in the collection of the Museum of London, whose 30-year relationship with London mudlarks is both committed and highly regulated.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#31. I personally can't think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.
Helene Hanff
#32. I'm not in a position to tell anyone anything about how to live his or her life, but I think it's worth noting that no one can lie to us as effectively as we can lie to ourselves. We know exactly what to say! And I do think that women, even extremely smart women, can be very, very vulnerable to men.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#33. A mutt is a dog. He is the stuff of dogginess, a creature allied to species, not breed, and untrammeled by human hand or preference.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#34. You'd have to go all the way back to 1972 to find a version of me who didn't care about theater, who didn't read Playbill and watch the Tony Awards, or get why Bob Fosse's choreography was so groundbreaking that all you need to say is 'Fosse hands' and theater people know what you mean.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#35. 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
#36. Like many people, I have a fascination with lies and the people who tell them. I wouldn't say I've never told a lie, but I don't think I've ever told one without both assuming I would be found out and feeling absolutely rotten about it.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. Portia remembered her interview in the small office upstairs ... in which she had been so shy, so terrified about not being good enough, not getting this thing, this chance, which she had only just discovered she wanted very badly.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.
Helene Hanff
#43. 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
#44. Most of all, I am struck by an irony central to the lot of a purebred dog: As it attains the hallmarks of its breed, it seems to simultaneously relinquish its basic dogginess, until it is less a dog than a Pomeranian, Collie or Bloodhound.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Back in the 1980s, when I was a lowly editorial assistant by day and trying to be a novelist by night, no god reigned so supreme as the god of literary prose.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#49. 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
#51. Serious writers pretend they don't care about film adaptations of their work, but it's a colossal lie: We all care.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#52. 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
#53. People need a narrative, and if there isn't one on offer, they make one up.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#54. Why is it that people who wouldn't dream of stealing anything else think it's perfectly all right to steal books?
Helene Hanff
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.
Helene Hanff
#59. To me, respect for human life begins with making it more difficult to obtain an inanimate object that is designed to snuff it out.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#60. Talent is the infinite capacity for taking pains. Genius is the infinite capacity for achievement without taking any pains at all.
Helene Hanff
#61. The women were responsible for everything. They were guilty of crimes, real and illusory. They had not thought hard enough, tried hard enough, asked enough of themselves. It was as if the plane had fallen from the sky for the sole reason that they had stopped flapping their arms.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#62. My dog is vicious to the uninvited guest, lavishly affectionate to the invited one, and so freakishly acute that he has mastered the English language.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#63. There is a sound to waiting. It sounds like held breath pounding its fists against the walls of the lung, damp and muffled beats.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#64. Pacing is not the sort of thing you can plan out beforehand, but you're always aware of it as you write, because you need to make constant decisions.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. If a woman chose the wrong person, he was always going to be the wrong person: that was all. The most capable therapist in the world wouldn't be able to do much more than negotiate the treaty.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#68. You know, wanting what you have is supposedly the secret of happiness.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#69. Hollywood isn't a place, it's a way of life.
Helene Hanff
#70. Buying a book you've never read is like buying a dress you've never tried on
Helene Hanff
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