Helene Hanff Quotes in 84 Charing Cross Road (1987)

Helene Hanff: I love inscriptions on flyleafs 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: [written in a letter to Frank] "I can never get interested in thing that didn't happen to people who never lived."

[first lines]

Businessman on plane: Your first trip to London?

Helene Hanff: Yes.

Businessman on plane: You want a word of advice? Don't trust the cab drivers; they'll take you five miles to go three blocks... and, uh, don't waste your time looking at a street map. Nobody can find their way around London - not even Londoners.

Helene Hanff: Maybe I should go to Baltimore instead.

Businessman on plane: No; you'll enjoy it. London's a great place. What kind of trip is it - business or pleasure?

Helene Hanff: Unfinished business.

[last lines]

Helene Hanff: Here I am, Frankie; I finally made it.

Helene Hanff: [typing] WHAT KIND OF A BLACK PROTESTANT BIBLE IS THIS! Kindly inform the Church of England they have loused up the most beautiful prose even written. Who ever taught Dr. Tindall the Vulgate Latin. They'll burn for it, mark my words. It's nothing to me, I'm Jewish myself, but I have a Catholic sister-in-law, a Methodist sister-in-law, a whole raft of Presbyterian cousins, through my late Uncle Abraham who was converted, and an aunt who's a Christian Science healer. And I'd like to think none of them would countenance an Anglican Latin Bible if they knew it existed. As it happens, they don't know Latin existed.

Helene Hanff: [reading from John Donne] All mankind is one volume. When one man dies, a chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language. And every chapter must be translated. God employs several translators; some piece are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice. But God's hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, in the library where every book shall live open to one another.

Helene Hanff: Being used to the dead white paper and the stiff cardboardy covers of American books, I never knew a book could be such a joy to the touch.

Helene Hanff: Doesn't anyone read English literature in New York?

Helene Hanff: I'm a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books.

Helene Hanff: [In cinema, watching "Brief Encounter", thinking to herself] Please write and tell me about London. I live for the day when I step off the boat-train and feel it's dirty sidewalks under my feet. I want to walk up Berkeley Square, and down Wimpole Street. And stand in St. Paul's where John Donne preached And sit on the step Elizabeth sat on when she refused to enter the Tower, and places like that. A newspaper man I know who was stationed in London during the war says that tourists go to England with preconceived notions, so they always find exactly what they are looking for. I told him I'd go looking for the England of English literature. And he said that it's there.