Quotes from Helene Hanff

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.

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.

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?

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 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.

I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for.

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 designed to ensure the family absolute privacy. And every newspaper in London carried headlines announcing PRINCESS ANNE HAS OVARIAN CYST REMOVED. I mean you're a young girl reared in heavily guarded seclusion and every beer drinker in every pub knows the precise state of your ovaries.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Somewhere along the way I came upon a mews with a small sign on the entrance gate addressed to the passing world. The sign orders flatly: COMMIT NO NUISANCE The more you stare at that, the more territory it covers. From dirtying the streets to housebreaking to invading Viet Nam, that covers all the territory there is.

Soy una apasionada de los libros escritos por testigos oculares.

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.

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.

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.

That's for me. I am a great lover of 'I was there' books.

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.

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.

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

purely hated myself because I hadn't bothered to ask his name. People oughtn't to breeze into your life and out again in ten seconds, without leaving even a name behind. As Mr. Dickens once pointed out, we're all on our way to the grave together.