“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, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“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, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.”
― Helene Hanff, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“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, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“Why is it that people who wouldn't dream of stealing anything else think it's perfectly all right to steal books?”
― Helene Hanff, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“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, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“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 had to take it for her Ph.D. They told her to write an essay in Early Anglo-Saxon on any-subject-of-her-own-choosing. “Which is all very well,” she said bitterly, “but the only essay subject you can find enough Early Anglo-Saxon words for is ‘How to Slaughter a Thousand Men in a Mead Hall’.”
― Helene Hanff, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“I personally can't think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.”
― Helene Hanff, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“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, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“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, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“I wish you hadn't been so over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf. It's the bookseller coming out in you all, you were afraid you'd decrease its value. You would have increased it for the present owner. (And possibly for the future owner. 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, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“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, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“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, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“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, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“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, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“Have you got De Tocqueville's Journey to America? Somebody borrowed mine and never gave it back. Why is it that people who wouldn't dream of stealing anything else think it's perfectly all right to steal books?”
― Helene Hanff, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“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, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“I houseclean my books every spring and throw out those I’m never going to read again likeI throw out clothes I’m never going to wear again. It shocks everybody. My friends are peculiar about books. They read all the best sellers, they get through them as fast as possible,I think they skip a lot. And they NEVER read anything a second time so they don’t remember a word of it a year later. But they are profoundly shocked to see me drop a book in the wastebasket or give it away. The way they look at it, you buy a book, you read it, you put it on the shelf, you never open it again for the rest of your life but YOU DON’T THROW IT OUT! NOT IF IT HAS A HARD COVER ON IT! Why not?I personally can’t think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.”
― Helene Hanff, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“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, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“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, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“Buying a book you've never read is like buying a dress you've never tried on”
― Helene Hanff, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for.”
― Helene Hanff, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“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, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“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, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“Soy una apasionada de los libros escritos por testigos oculares.”
― Helene Hanff, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“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, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“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, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
Helene Hanff
Born place: in Philadelphia, The United States
Born date April 15, 1916
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“In a lower voice, Hale asked, “I trust you know what to do?” “Indeed, sir.” Marcus stood a little straighter. “I shall endear myself to the staff and find out where all the skeletons are buried. Both literally and figuratively.” “We can probably do without the literal skeletons, but I like the enthusiasm,” Hale said with a slap on Marcus’s arm,”
― Ally Carter, quote from The Grift of the Magi
“What if you get stranded in the town where pears and winter are variants for one another? Can you eat winter? No. Can you live six months inside a frozen pear? No. But there is a place, I know the place, where you will stand and see pear and winter side by side as walls stand by in silence. Can you punctuate yourself as silence? You will see the edges cut away from you, back into a world, of another kind-- back into real emptiness, some would say. Well, we are objects in a wind that stopped, is my view.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Plainwater: Essays and Poetry
“Shergahn and friend lay like poleaxed steers, and the Daranfelian's greasy hair was thick with potatoes, carrots, gravy, and chunks of beef. His companion had less stew in his hair, but an equally large lump was rising fast, and Brandark flipped his improvised club into the air, caught it in proper dipping position, and filled it once more from the pot without even glancing at them. He raised the ladle to his nose, inhaled deeply, and glanced at the cook with an impudent twitch of his ears.
"Smells delicious," he said while the laughter started up all around the fire. "I imagine a bellyful of this should help a hungry man sleep. Why, just look what a single ladle of it did for Shergahn!”
― David Weber, quote from Oath of Swords
“After that, we don’t talk, instead we get hammered. Shot after shot we down, chasing each one with a Little Debbie snack. Before we know it, we’re hanging on to the bar counter floating around in a sugar and alcohol coma, just the way I like it.
“There’s my girl,” Racer shouts as he topples off his stool and onto the floor, laughing hysterically. Georgie stops in her tracks and looks over at Emma, who’s standing next to her, both holding two boxes of Little Debbie snacks each.
“Emmmmmmmma,” Tucker drags out, waving his glass in the air. “You brought the snacks.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Emma mutters as she approaches us.
I point to my mouth and say, “Feed me. Daddy needs sugar.”
Racer is beside me, tangled in the pegs of his bar stool, still laughing. “Did you bring Oatmeal Pies, George? Please tell me you have the pies.”
“Uh, I think you’ve had enough for tonight,” she says, looking down at her boyfriend.
“Never!” Racer struggles to get up and finally knocks the chair over to free himself. “Fucking bitch chair, digging into me with its claws.” Talking to the stool directly he says, “I’m taken, warm someone else’s ass.”
“He’s going to propose, chair, leave him alone,” Tucker announces, causing me to cringe.
“Dude, don’t say it out loud.” I punch Tucker in the shoulder. “Georgie is right there.” All three of us turn to Georgie, who’s shaking her head in humor. Hopefully.
“I’ll take Aaron,” Emma tells Georgie. “Seems like Racer is more of a handful.”
“Hell yeah, I am.” Racer stumbles while cupping his crotch. “A giant handful.”
Georgie rolls her eyes. “And that’s our cue to leave.”
“But we didn’t eat our snacks.”
“Seems like you had enough.” Georgie grabs Racer by the hand. “Come on.”
As they walk away, Racer asks, “Want to have sex in the car?”
“Not even a little.”
“Here, you two, you can have your boxes of snacks.” Emma hands Tucker and me both a box of Oatmeal Pies that we clutch to our chests.
“You’re the best,” I admit.
“She is, isn’t she?” Tucker says. “I love her so fucking hard. Best wife ever.”
She pulls on both of our hands to get us moving. “She wins wife of the year award,” I announce. “Best wife goes to Emma. Can we get a round of applause?”
Tucker breaks open his Oatmeal Pies and starts spraying them like confetti. “Emma. Emma. Emma.” He chants, getting the three other patrons in the bar to join in.
I pump my fist as well, forgetting everything from earlier. I knew I could count on my guys.
“Emma. Emma. Emma . . .”
And then, everything fades to black. Emotions and feelings are non-existent as I pass out, just the way I like it. Just the way I need it.”
― Meghan Quinn, quote from The Other Brother
“It was still hard for a Korean to become a Japanese citizen, and there were many who considered such a thing shameful—for a Korean to try to become a citizen of its former oppressor. When she told her friends in New York about this curious historical anomaly and the pervasive ethnic bias, they were incredulous at the thought that the friendly, well-mannered Japanese they knew could ever think she was somehow criminal, lazy, filthy, or aggressive—the negative stereotypical traits of Koreans in Japan.”
― Min Jin Lee, quote from Pachinko
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