Martha Gellhorn > Quotes

“I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.”
― Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters

“Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.”
― Martha Gellhorn, Travels With Myself and Another

“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.”
― Martha Gellhorn

“Life is not long at all, never long enough, but days are very long indeed.”
― Martha Gellhorn

“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.”
― 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 ends never justify the means because IT never ends.”
― 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

“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

“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.”
― Martha Gellhorn

“travel is compost for the mind”
― Martha Gellhorn