Amrithaa > Amrithaa's Quotes

“You decide to stop using the word “anachronism” when a seventeenth-century carriage drives through the gates of Buckingham Palace carrying twentieth-century Russian or African diplomats to be welcomed by a queen. “Anachronism” implies something long dead, and nothing is dead here. History, as they say, is alive and well and living in London.”
― Helene Hanff, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

“I went down to Chemical—and after asking to see everything but my teeth, they cashed {my cheque}. Nothing infuriates me like those friendly, folksy bank ads in magazines and on TV. Every bank I ever walked into was about as folksy as a cobra.”
― Helene Hanff, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

“Tell me,” said Leo. “You’ve written a beautiful book. Why haven’t we heard from you before? What was wrong with your earlier work? Too good or not good enough.” “Not good enough,” I said. And he nodded and went on to something else, and I think that’s when we became soul mates.”
― Helene Hanff, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

“And because I didn’t have the moral backbone to say, “I don’t know,” I explained the whole thing to her—off the top of my head.”
― Helene Hanff, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

“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, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

“I tell you it’s insidious being an ersatz Duchess, people rushing to give you what you want before you’ve had time to want it. If I kept this up for more than a month it would ruin my moral fiber.”
― Helene Hanff, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

“Carmen, dear,” I said, “I am not the kind of author who wants to be protected from her public. Any fan who phones might want to feed me, and I am totally available as a dinner guest. Just give out my address all over.”
― Helene Hanff, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

“84, Charing Cross Road was no best seller, you understand; it didn’t make me rich or famous. It just got me hundreds of letters and phone calls from people I never knew existed; it got me wonderful reviews; it restored a self-confidence and self-esteem I’d lost somewhere along the way, God knows how many years ago. It brought me to England. It changed my life.”
― Helene Hanff, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

“I seem to be living in a state of deep hypnosis, every time I mail a postcard home I could use Euphoria for a return address.”
― Helene Hanff, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

“BUCKINGHAM PALACE.
Vacancy in the central wash-up of the main kitchen, for female applicants only. Non-residential. . . .

Apply in writing to:
Master of the Household, Buckingham Palace, London SW 1

Wouldn’t you like to take that job for one day, just to listen to the gossip?”
― Helene Hanff, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

“My problem was that by this time the Colonel and I had already had thirty straight hours of Togetherness and I’m not equipped for it, not even with the best friend I have on earth, which he isn’t.”
― Helene Hanff, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

“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.”
― Helene Hanff, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

“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.”
― Helene Hanff, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

“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.”
― Helene Hanff, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

“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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 84, Charing Cross Road

“I personally can't think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.”
― Helene Hanff, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 84, Charing Cross Road