Quotes by Martha Gellhorn

About Martha Gellhorn:

Martha Ellis Gellhorn is now considered one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century. She reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career. Gellhorn was also the third wife of American novelist Ernest Hemingway, from 1940 to 1945. At the age of 89, ill and almost completely blind, she died in 1998 of an apparent suicide. The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism is named after her.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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.

Martha Gellhorn

Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.

Martha Gellhorn

In Warsaw, you also remember that you are in a Communist-controlled country, though by all accounts the control is now humane and lenient, judged by what it was and what it is in other satellite countries. Still you do hear the incompetent echo in th...

Martha Gellhorn

I see mysteries and complications wherever I look, and I have never met a steadily logical person.

Martha Gellhorn

If I practised sex, out of moral conviction, that was one thing; but to enjoy it... seemed a defeat.

Martha Gellhorn

I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents.

Martha Gellhorn

I didn't write. I just wandered about.

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.

Martha Gellhorn

There were ten concentration camps in France from 1939 on.

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.

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.

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.

Martha Gellhorn

A broken heart is such a shabby thing, like poverty and failure and the incurable diseases which are also deforming. I hate it and am ashamed of it, and I must somehow repair this heart and put it back into its normal condition, as a tough somewhat s...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Martha Gellhorn

And though various organizations in America and England collected money and sent food parcels to these refugees, nothing was ever received by the Spanish.

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 acce...

Martha Gellhorn

I only knew about daily life. It was said, well, it isn't everybody's daily life. That is why I started.

Martha Gellhorn

Author Bio

  • NameMartha Gellhorn
  • Descriptionjournalist from the United States
  • AliasesMartha Ellis Gellhorn
  • BornNovember 8, 1908
  • DiedFebruary 15, 1998
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionAuthor; Journalist; Novelist