Helene Hanff Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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