Martha Gellhorn quotes

It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination. (Martha Gellhorn)
Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
I found out about the Spanish war because I was in Germany when it began. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
Why do people talk of the horrors of old age? It's great. I feel like a fine old car with the parts gradually wearing out, but I'm not complaining,... Those who find growing old terrible are people who haven't done what they wanted with their lives. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
I tell you loneliness is the thing to master. Courage and fear, love, death are only parts of it and can easily be ruled afterwards. If I make myself master my own loneliness there will be peace or safety: and perhaps these are the same. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
The road passed through a curtain of pine forest and came out on a flat, rolling snow field. In this field the sprawled or bunched bodies of Germans lay thick, like some dark shapeless vegetable. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
What the trees can do handsomely-greening and flowering, fading and then the falling of leaves-human beings cannot do with dignity, let alone without pain. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
Life is not long at all, never long enough, but days are very long indeed. (Martha Gellhorn)
Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
Thousand got away to other countries; thousands returned to Spain tempted by false promises of kindness. By the tens of thousands, these Spaniards died of neglect in the concentration camps. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
Furthermore, they were constantly informed by all the camp authorities that they had been abandoned by the world: they were beggars and lucky to receive the daily soup of starvation. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
After the desperate years of their own war, after six years of repression inside Spain and six years of horror in exile, these people remain intact in spirit. They are armed with a transcendent faith; they have never won, and yet they have never accepted defeat. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
I see mysteries and complications wherever I look, and I have never met a steadily logical person. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
I followed the war wherever I could reach it. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
If I practised sex, out of moral conviction, that was one thing; but to enjoy it... seemed a defeat. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
Between his eyes, there were four lines, the marks of such misery as children should never feel. He spoke with that wonderful whisky voice that so many Spanish children have, and he was a tough and entire little boy. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
In the last camp they all ate grass, until the authorities forbade them to pull it up. They were accustomed to having the fruits of their little communal gardens stolen by the guards, after they had done all the work; but at the last camp everything was stolen. (Martha Gellhorn)
There were ten concentration camps in France from 1939 on. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
It is alleged that half a million Spanish men, women and children fled to France after the Franco victory. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
But now that the guerrilla fighting is over, the Spaniards are again men without a country or families or homes or work, though everyone appreciates very much what they did. View quote
Martha Gellhorn
I didn't write. I just wandered about. View quote
Martha Gellhorn