Helene Hanff Quotes

22 quotes in 519 categories

• 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.
• I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest.
• 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…
• Fact One: Cataract surgery is simple, painless and (except with implants) risk free ... the whole procedure is common, routine and nothing to worry about.…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• I personally can't think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• History, as they say, is alive and well and living in London.
• 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.
• Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.
• Why is it that people who wouldn't dream of stealing anything else think it's perfectly all right to steal books?
• It's against my principles to buy a book I haven't read, it's like buying a dress you haven't tried on.

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