Top 40 Helene Hanff Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Helene Hanff

2. “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

3. “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

4. “Hollywood isn’t a place, it’s a way of life.”

— Helene Hanff

5. “Talent is the infinite capacity for taking pains. Genius is the infinite capacity for achievement without taking any pains at all.”

— Helene Hanff

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

— Helene Hanff

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

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

— Helene Hanff

13. “Why is it that people who wouldn’t dream of stealing anything else think it’s perfectly all right to steal books?”

— Helene Hanff

14. “I do think it’s a very uneven exchange of Christmas presents. You’ll eat yours up in a week and have nothing left to show for it by New Year’s Day. I’ll have mine 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

15. “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

16. “I personally can’t think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.”

— Helene Hanff

17. “Anything he liked, I’ll like. Except if it’s fiction. I never can get interested in things that didn’t happen to people who never lived.”

— Helene Hanff

18. “I’ve been sitting on the edge of the bed for an hour in a complete daze. I told him if I die toight I’ll die happy, it’s all here, everything’s here.”

— Helene Hanff

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

— Helene Hanff

20. “Soy una apasionada de los libros escritos por testigos oculares.”

— Helene Hanff

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “I never overcame my conviction that writing for commercial television was a kind of prostitution.”

— Helene Hanff

26. “I shall be obliged if you will send Nora and the girls to church every Sunday for the next month to pray for the continued health and strength of the messrs. gilliam, reese, snider, campanella, robinson, hodges, furillo, podres, necombe and labine, collectively known as the The Brooklyn Dodgers. If they lose this World Series I shall Do Myself In and then where will you be?”

— Helene Hanff

27. “I fail to see why you did not understand that groceryman, he did not call it ‘ground ground nuts,’ he called it ground ground-nuts which is the only really SENSible thing to call it. Peanuts grow in the GROUND and are therefore GROUND-nuts, and after you take them out of the ground you grind them up and you have ground ground-nuts, which is a much more accurate name than peanut butter, you just don’t understand English.”

— Helene Hanff

28. “I’m always ashamed when I discover how well-read other people are and how ignorant I am in comparison. If you saw the long list of famous books and authors I’ve never read you wouldn’t believe it. 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 the page 20, say, I realize I can recite page 21 and 22 from memory. Then I put the book away for a few years.”

— Helene Hanff

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. “A newspaper man I know, who was stationed in London during the war, says tourists go to England with preconceived notions, so they always find exactly what they go looking for. I told him I’d go looking for the England of English literature, and he said: “Then it’s there.”

— Helene Hanff

31. “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

32. “It’s amazing how alike and anonymous all suburbs are, as undistinguishae from one another as highways. Maybe that’s why I love cities. There’s not a row of houses in London that could possibly be mistaken for New York. There isn’t a square block in Manhattan that will ever for a moment remind you of London.”

— Helene Hanff

33. “I just threw out a book somebody gave me, it was some slob’s version of what it was like to live in the time of Oliver Cromwell – only the slob didn’t LIVE in the time of Oliver Cromwell so how the hell does he know what it was like? Anybody wants to know what it was like to live in the time of Oliver Cromwell can slop on the sofa with Milton on his pro side and Walton on his con, and they’ll not only tell him what it was like, they’ll take him there.”

— Helene Hanff

34. “I shall sprinkle pale pencil marks through it pointing out the best passages to some booklover yet unborn.”

— Helene Hanff

35. “One of these days I’m going to write a book about living in New York – in a sixteen-story apartment house complete with families, bachelors, career girls, a ninety-year-old Village Idiot and a doorman who can tell you the name and apartment number of every one of the twenty-seven resident dogs. I am so tired of being told what a terrible place New York is to live in by people who don’t live there.”

— Helene Hanff

36. “From where I sit, London’s a lot closer than 17th street.”

— Helene Hanff

37. “So, Elizabeth will have to ascend the throne without me. Teeth are all I am going to see crowned for the next couple of years.”

— Helene Hanff

38. “Well, if your books cost what they’re worth, I couldn’t afford them.”

— Helene Hanff

39. “People oughtn’t to breeze into your life and out again in ten seconds, without leaving a name behind.”

— Helene Hanff

40. “That’s for me. I am a great lover of ‘I was there’ books.”

— Helene Hanff