A collection of quotes by Martha Gellhorn on sex, war, travel, dignity, politics, war, life, love, hate, marriage, survival, relationships, fate, society, injustice and heart.
32 Great Martha Gellhorn Quotes That Will Ignite A Sense Of Self-Worth In You
‘I followed war wherever I could reach it’ perfectly explains Martha Gellhorn as the greatest war correspondent of the 20th century. Wife of the famous poet Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn was an American novelist, travel writer, and journalist, who covered and reported every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year journalistic career. Her life was exciting and she travelled around the globe, and gave a first-hand glimpse of war. A ‘John Burrough School’ pass out, Gellhorn left her graduation midway to pursue career as a journalist. Gellhorn used her observation and communication skills to pen the effect of ‘Great Depression’ and thus became one of the major contributors to American history. Gellhorn’s career as a war correspondent began when she covered ‘Spanish Civil War’. Thereafter, Gellhorn covered all the major wars in her lifetime until her health deteriorated considerably. Although best known for her ground-breaking journalism, Gelllhorn was an accomplished fiction writer and penned about five novels, fourteen novellas and two collections of short stories that were inspired by her prodigious travels. Gellhorn left behind a rich collection of thoughts and quotations covering various topics and issues. These quotes and sayings by Martha Gellhorn would give you a new perception to life and living.
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.
It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.
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.
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
If I practised sex, out of moral conviction, that was one thing; but to enjoy it... seemed a defeat.
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.
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.
Then somebody suggested I should write about the war, and I said I didn't know anything about the war. I did not understand anything about it. I didn't see how I could write it.
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.
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
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.
Martha Gellhorn
It is alleged that half a million Spanish men, women and children fled to France after the Franco victory.
Martha Gellhorn
Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.
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
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.
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
Life is not long at all, never long enough, but days are very long indeed.
Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it
Martha Gellhorn
Here one has the perfect example of justice: the men have kept their women enslaved...stupid and limited and apart, for their male vanity and power; result: the dull women bore the daylights out of the men.
Martha Gellhorn
Italy was about churches, Greece it's ruins; but Israel was about surviving and about feeling glad.
Martha Gellhorn
Joseph McCarthy, the Junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin, ruled America like devil king for four years. His purges were an American mirror image of Stalin's purges, an unnoticed similarity.
