Travels with Myself and Another: A Memoir

by Martha Gellhorn

Moaning is unseemly; get to work. Work is the best remedy for despair.

Americans were funnier before America became the most powerful nation on earth. (The British, on the other hand, relieved of Empire, have grown much funnier than they used to be.)

Money, not war, destroyed the old life of the islands.

I was worried about books. Solitude is all right with books, awful without.

The missionaries are something else; their object has not been to make money, but I am suspicious of them, mainly because I look at our white world and cannot see that nearly 2,000 years of Christianity has cured our savagery.

For the first time in my life, it occurred to me that there was glamour in business; previously I had only thought business was a dreary way to make money.

impatience is the clearest possible way of saying: you are a fool. Impatience is the emotion that comes most easily and is hardest to govern. Also, one must not laugh at incompetence or bone-headedness; one must wait.