Martha Gellhorn Quotes

I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.

Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.

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.

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 scarred but operating organ.

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.

I wait every year for summer, and it is usually good, but it is never as good as that summer I am always waiting for.

Life is not long at all, never long enough, but days are very long indeed.

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.

And this urge to run away from what I love is a sort of sadism I no longer pretend to understand.

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.

the ends never justify the means because IT never ends.

travel is compost for the mind

War happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say and it seems to me I have been saying it forever. Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

I took only one suitcase, and a cosmetics case for medicines but I was worried about books. Solitude is all right with books, awful without.

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.

Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it

Proof of the power of the press is the fear of the press by the government. Martha Gellhorn as quoted by Helen Thomas

I love you. Have a hell of a good time. I don’t really know what else is worth having.

On the night of New Year’s Day, I thought of a wonderful New Year’s resolution for the men who run the world: get to know the people who only live in it.

My kind of loneliness now has no cure, you know; it is something I expect to live with until I die. Friends are heavenly kind, sometimes fun; it would be fatal not to have them. But I by no means need or want daily contact; perhaps it takes as much out of me as it gives, perhaps takes more.

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.

I had a sudden notion of why history is such a mess: humans do not live long enough. We only learn from experience and have no time to use it in a continuous and sensible way.

I feel terribly strange, like a shadow, and full of dread. I dread the time ahead, the amputating time, I do not see how to manage it. I do not want the world to go dark and narrow and mean, and the world has been very unlovely in my eyes, and I very unlovely in it…

I want to read and write and be very quiet.

But the soul concerns me; and I am beginning to wonder whether it is wise or useful to spend so much time searching for one’s own.

If I were a first rate writer, I wouldn't mind a bit. What does depress me is this: it is so desperately hard and so obsessive and so lonely to write that, in return for all this work, one would like a little self satisfaction. And that is never going to come, for the simple reason that I do not deserve it. I cannot be a good enough writer. You see? I call it grim. But the future looks awfully clear to me.

No wars, in the war-logged record of our species, have been terminal. Until now, when we know that nuclear war would be the death of our planet. It is beyond belief that any governments–those brief political figures–arrogate to themselves the right to stop history, at their discretion.

Politics really must be a rotten profession considering what awful moral cowards most politicians become as soon as they get the job.

I am frightened and doubtful, and everyone who touches me must suffer.

People do not yet realize (because the mind isn't built that way) what war can be. They fear it but surely they fear it the way children fear nightmares, dimly, without definite images in their heads of how it will all work out.

It is much harder to be lonely, when you have for a while stopped being lonely. I was used to having only myself, cold and hard as that is; I could live with it. And now I wait, for a voice, a face, a body, that is not going to be here, is not mine, does not in any case wait as I do, nor share this homesickness. […] How to explain that I taught myself to be tough and indifferent, because it mattered too much and learned not even to weep in my mind not to notice.

Endurance was the Chinese secret weapon. The Japanese should have understood that, and everybody else had better remember it.

The English are very proud of their Parliament, and week in, week out, century after century, they have pretty good cause to be.

If there is a war, then all of the things most of us do won't matter any more. I have a feeling that one has to work all day and all night and live too, and swim and get the sun one's hair and laugh and love as many people as one can find around and do this all terribly fast, because the time getting shorter and shorter every day.

It is high time that I learn to be more careful about hope, a reckless emotion for travelers. The sensible approach would be to the expect the worst, the very worst, that way you avoid grievous disappointment and who knows with a tiny bit of luck, you might even have a moderately pleasant surprise, like the difference between hell and purgatory.

Since I am devoted to my own freedom, I didn’t think it just to deny other people theirs; and a basic freedom must be to be bossed by your own kind, not by foreigners.

Our hearts are light and gay because now its happening, we're starting, we're travelling again.

I have no intention of being a footnote in someone else’s life.” [on being a war correspondent during WWII]

The manipulated millions could be aroused or soothed by any lies. The guiding light of journalism was no stronger than a glow-worm.

I do not hope for a world at peace, all of it, all the time. I do not believe in the perfectibility of man, which is what would be required for world peace; I only believe in the human race. I believe the human race must continue.

The latrine broke my lion heart.

I felt both puny and pretentious, trying to write in the grandeur of that natural world where everything was older than time and I was the briefest object in the landscape.

Someday our children, whom we love, may blame us for dishonoring America because we did not care enough about children 10,000 miles away [written, 1967].

... none had been outside Russia. I kept trying to remember something that I had read about a species of fish that was born, lived, spawned, died in the dark waters of a cave; and were blind.

As citizens, I think we all have an exhausting duty to now what our governments are up to, and it is cowardice or laziness to ask: what can I do about it anyway? Every squeak counts, if only in self-respect.

What was new to our ears these days, and thrilling to hear, was the steadiness and justice of those who spoke, the abscence of panic and exaggeration the quiet insistence on legal processes as opposed to trial by suspicion. McCarthyism so repelled the English that they take special care not to be infected by it.

Martha Gellhorn said: ‘War happens to people, one by one.’ That’s exactly it, you see. Until it happens to you, you have no way of understanding it, let alone imagining it. Until then, it is simply a monster under the bed.

It is amazing that the refugees stay sane. First the bombs, perhaps the "battle" around them, their casualties, their naked helplessness; then the flight, leaving behind everything they have worked for all their lives; then the semi-starvation and ugly hardship of the camps or the slums; and as a final cruelty, the killing diseases which only strike at them.

What gave these krauts a right to say who should be born and who shouldn't, and who could live and be let alone, and who would get caught and killed?

He had no other life and no other knowledge; he knew that he could not live anywhere now because in his mind, slyly, there was nothing but horror.

She tried, leaning back and closing her eyes, to put in order what she had seen, heard, and what she had known before. She wanted to place her knowledge in paragraphs ( a good opening sentence? she thought), so that it would be easy to handle when she came to write it. But it did not fit in paragraphs and she could not see it, plain and informative, colourful but unimpassioned, on a page. There was no beginning, no middle, no end.

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 the tapped hotel telephone, you do notice that people look over their shoulders when talking in restaurants - the secret police are dormant but not forgotten; you feel in your bones, as you would a threatening change in the weather, every change in Russian mood or action. This is not and air we have ever breathed; I doubt if we would be strong enough to resist such a climate and stay as healthy in spirit as the Poles.

Cornered, she seemed to possess no mechanism for behaving well. By the same token, when not trapped or obliged to confront people or situations that upset her, she had a particular ability to think about them with apparently genuine pleasure. Martha

In democracies where the citizens may read, hear or say what they like, the leaders are no better and no worse than the followers. So perhaps, if we cannot blame the leaders because the job of peacemaking is a sorry mess, we can only blame ourselves.

A dock worker from East Ham also spoke of freedom. "You'll never find the English going Communist" he said. "We don't like it. It's not true Communism, it dictatorial. We want to say what we think. I'm a republican myself and I don't like the Royal Family. They all look as if a good day's work would kill them".

Martha had been struck by a line in a Doris Lessing novel—“I don’t enjoy pleasure”—and decided that what she enjoyed in life were surprises and work. “But it’s alarming,” she wrote to Teecher, “to grow less and less gregarious. I can hardly bear social occasions; I feel as if I’d written the script long ago.” While

My vehement distaste for Reaganism and Thatcherism is joined to 35.2 million Americans who voted against Reagan in 1980 (out of a total 76.5 million votes cast) and 37.5 million Americans who did likewise in 1984; and allied with 57.8% of the British electorate who voted against Mrs. Thatcher in 1987. Plus 56.1% anti-Thatcherites in 1979 and 57.6% in 1983. That is quite a lot of consensus repugnance.

Martha Gellhorn joined Hemingway in Madrid one month later. After six weeks in Spain, Ernest left, picked up the manuscript of his novel in Paris, and went to Bimini to revise it. There he was reunited with his children and Pauline. A few weeks later he came to New York again to deliver a speech before the Second American Writers’ Congress at Carnegie Hall. Martha sat by his side during the speeches that preceded his. Her influence perhaps explained a new political tone that his speech displayed. “Really good writers are always rewarded under almost any existing system of government that they can tolerate,” he said before the writers’ congress. “There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism. For fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live and work under fascism.” While

A few days later, from a wall along the river, Martha Gellhorn watched the Soviet troops move on. ‘The army came in like a flood; it had no special form, there were no orders given. It came and rolled over the stone quays and out onto the roads like water rising, like ants, like locusts. What was moving along there was not so much an army, but a whole world.’ Many of the soldiers were wearing medals from the Battle of Stalingrad, and the entire group had fought its way at least 4,000 kilometres to the west in the last few years, most of it on foot. The trucks were kept rolling with impromptu repairs, the countless female soldiers looked like professional boxers, the sway-backed horses were driven along as though by Ben Hur himself, there seemed to be neither order nor plan, but according to Gellhorn it was impossible ‘to describe the sense of power radiating from this chaos of soldiers and broken-down equipment’. And she thought how sorry the Germans must be that they had ever started a war with the Russians.

It is not easy to be the citizen of a Superpower, nor is it getting easier. I would feel isolated with my shame if I were not sure that I belong, among millions of Americans, to a perennial minority of the nation. The obstinate bleeding hearts who will never agree that might makes right and know if the end justifies the means, the end is worthless. Power corrupts, an old truism but why does it also make the powerful so stupid? Their power schemes become unstuck in time, at cruel cost to other; then the powerful put their stupid important heads together and invent the next similar schemes [written 1987].

The real life of the East is agony to watch and horror to share. One of the three greatest joys in life is swimming naked in clean tropical sea. We need a root of personal experience from which to grow our understanding. Each new experience plants another root; the smallest root will serve. The lethargy of compounded discomfort and boredom is the trademark of the genuine horror journey. That state of grace which can rightly be called happiness, when body and mind rejoice together. This occurs, as a divine surprise, in travel; this is why I will never finish traveling. Loving is a habit like another and requires something nearby for daily practice. I loved the cat, the cat appeared to love me. As for me, the name Surinam was enough. I had to see a place with a name like that. Stinking with rancid coconut butter, the local Elizabeth Arden skin cream. You define your own horror journey, according to your taste. My definition of what makes a journey wholly or partially horrible is boredom. Add discomfort, fatigue, strain in large amounts to get the purest-quality horror, but the kernel is boredom. Bali- a museum island, boringly exquisite, filled with poor beautiful people being stared at by rich beautiful people. No sight is better calculated to turn anyone off travel than the departure lounge of a big airport.

Always delighted to grab any privileges I can get, I don’t like the sense of being privileged by law.

It is high time that I learn to be more careful about hope, a reckless emotion for travellers. The sensible approach would be to expect the worst, the very worst; that way you avoid grievous disappointment and who knows, with a tiny bit of luck, you might even have a moderately pleasant surprise, like the difference between hell and purgatory.

Here one has the perfect example of justice: the men have kept their women enslaved—the Arabs more than the Christian Copts—kept them stupid and limited and apart, for their male vanity and power; result: the dull women bore the daylights out of the men.

Slowly we wound uphill past fields and thick forest until we reached the eastern edge of the Rift Valley. Far below, as far as I could see, lay the golden plain ringed by blue mountains. It was true, it was there, and more magical than I had ever pictured it.

This was not the velvet embracing desert sky at El Geneina; this was infinite space. The idea of no boundaries, no end, is terrifying in the abstract and much worse if you are looking at it. The far-off stars were an icy crust; the darkness beyond the stars was more than I could handle. The machinery that keeps me going is not geared to cope with infinity and eternity as so clearly displayed in that sky.

The white hunter was laughing happily, his adoring girl was open-mouthed in admiration for his nerve, I was sweating with dismay and outrage, and then an elephant charged and did not stop and our hero stepped hard on the gas and drove off, saying, “Not bluffing that time.” So now I knew, lucky me, what a medium-size elephant stampede was like. Doomed to see elephants in the company of lunatics. All I wanted was to watch them with love and respect, at a reasonable distance.

Impatience leading swiftly to boredom is my vice, not panic.

In a Sunday Times piece entitled “Courage Knows No Gender,” she quoted Martha Gellhorn, who said, “Feminists nark me. I think they’ve done a terrible disservice to women, branding us as ‘women’s writers.’ Nobody says men writers; before, we were all simply writers.

It is an almost overpowering effort to be just, informed, sane and strong when you are worried about a roof over your head, money for food, for the children's shoes, for coal, for a little fun, worried and harassed by the daily unending problem of living. But it is an effort that must be made, for lasting peace is not going to come of itself, nor cheaply, nor due to someone else.

The fear syndrome [a species of propaganda], by exaggerating Vietcong power for destruction, misplaces the real pain of the real war, and is immensely dangerous. It leads to hysteria, to hawk-demands for a bigger war; it pushes us nearer and nearer to World War Three. The fear syndrome in no way serves the American cause; it can only jeopardize more American lives, with the ultimate risk of jeopardizing all life.

The men in Washington seem unable to accept that there are more poor people than rich peoplele in the world. They do not recognize that poor people, in the late twentieth century, cannot endure poverty and disease and ignorance forever. When minimal social justice is long denied, the poor will rebel. If rebellion can be crushed - as is perhaps possible in a very small country like El Salvador - it will rise again later. Nicaragua can be bombed flat, and then what? A success story like Vietnam? [1986].

Dr. Soekarno was always exactly what he was in the beginning, a whizz-bang demagogue, an opportunist, just another little dictator. U.S. officialdom never tires of backing that type. Nor does U.S. officialdom take sufficient note of the writing on the wall, such as: Down With All Whites. I wonder what the phrase looks like in Vietnamese.

Many years later, Martha revisited the same Caribbean islands. She found yachts and rubber Zodiac dinghies, plastic bottles on the seabed, casinos and boutiques in the sleepy ports, and great bald patches of land, stripped for development, where once all had been jungle and green. It was, she wrote sadly, a world lost. Returning

Michael had an aching need to show the world what Jill had not been able to display herself, much as Thomas Carlyle had done for his late wife Jane and H. G. Wells had done for his Jane after she died. These men relied on women to perform in what Martha Gellhorn liked to call “the kitchen of life.

We had a lengthy discussion of the difficulties I had had working on other biographies and the efforts made by Martha Gellhorn, Susan Sontag and others to prevent publication. Gellhorn’s representative, Bill Buford, sent a threatening letter to my publisher. Michael, a journalist first, called Buford a “dirty dog.” I never dreamed, then, that he, too, would, in the end, assume a rather high-handed attitude towards my manuscript, ordering me to make changes and deferring to the feelings of others. On this day, I said: “I don’t respond well to those threats. I don’t allow them to intimidate me.” “We don’t believe in authorised biographies,” Michael concluded. “All authorised biographies are hereby condemned.” I would remember these words later when Michael the Apostate appeared.

the American journalist Martha Gellhorn wrote after trekking across much of China in 1940. No worse luck could befall a human being than to be born and live there, unless by some golden chance you happened to be born one of the .00000099 percent who had power, money, privilege (and even then, even then). I pitied them all, I saw no tolerable future for them, and I longed to escape away from what I had escaped into: the age-old misery, filth, hopelessness and my own claustrophobia inside that enormous country. Skinny, sweaty rickshaw pullers strained at their large-wheeled contraptions to provide transportation to the rich. The scenes of nearly naked coolies towing barges up canals and rivers, leaning so far against their harnesses as to be almost horizontal to the ground, were an emblem, picturesque and horrible at the same time, of the unrelenting strain of everyday life in China, as were such other standard images as the women with leathery skin barefoot in the muck planting and weeding, the farmers covered in sweat at the foot pumps along fetid canals or carrying their loads of brick or straw on balancing poles slung over their shoulders or moving slowly and patiently behind water buffalo pulling primitive plows. The fly-specked hospitals, the skinny, crippled beggars, the thousands and thousands of villages made of baked mud whose houses, as one visitor described them, were “smoky, with gray walls and black tiled roofs; the inhabitants, wearing the invariable indigo-dyed cloth … moving about their business in an inextricable confusion of scraggy chickens, pigs, dogs, and babies.

my reliance on fair use in the Hellman biography became a template for how I was to approach my unauthorized biographies of Martha Gellhorn, Susan Sontag, and Sylvia Plath.

Perché finché la guerra è altrove, non riesci a prenderla sul serio. Come ha detto Martha Gellhorn "La guerra è un fatto personale". È proprio così: finché non capita a te, non riesci a capirla, tanto meno a immaginarla. Finché non entra nella tua vita è irreale

only a handful in my day, as you can imagine. And really, it was women like Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and Martha Gellhorn who paved the way for the rest of us.” “I just read Martha’s book, Travels with Myself and Another. What a fascinating woman.” It

came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.

War is a malignant disease, an idiocy, a prison, and the pain it causes is beyond telling or imagining; but war was our condition and our history, the place we had to live in.

body, will be able to cherish freedom, revere the rights of others, and practice its highest talent, love, when the earth is sterile from man-made poisons, the air tainted, and the race sick and dying.

Marriage would wreck us. Both of us...I'm sorry. It's just not right for me.' 'Don't you love me?' 'Of course I love you. But that doesn't mean I want to marry you.

Trays crashed off our laps, bottles spilled; the ship proceeded with the motion of a dolphin, lovely in a dolphin and vile in a ship.

I am not lonely, living this way, because I have given up expecting that loneliness can be blotted out by anyone else; my loneliness is my own cherished possession and probably my only one.” — Martha Gellhorn, in a letter to Campbell Beckett, from Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn