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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

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Helene Hanff
Age: 80 †
Born: 1916
Born: April 15
Died: 1997
Died: April 9
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Fall
Ghost
Else
Falling
Ever
Former
Looks
Keeps
Pristine
Things
Places
Owner
Never
Open
Delightful
Anyone
Owners
Read
Points

More quotes by Helene Hanff

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I never overcame my conviction that writing for commercial television was a kind of prostitution.
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Hollywood isn't a place, it's a way of life.
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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.
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Fact One: Cataract surgery is simple, painless and (except with implants) risk free ... the whole procedure is common, routine and nothing to worry about. Fact Two: Fact One applies only to cataracts on the eyes in somebody else's head.
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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.
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Talent is the infinite capacity for taking pains. Genius is the infinite capacity for achievement without taking any pains at all.
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I personally can't think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.
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Why is it that people who wouldn't dream of stealing anything else think it's perfectly all right to steal books?
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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?
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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.
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I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest.
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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 realize I can recite pages 21 and 22 from memory. Then I put the book away for a few years.
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