Gellhorn Quotes

“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”
― Caroline Moorehead, Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life

“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”
― Caroline Moorehead, Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life

“Horribly aware of what was happening, conscious, as she had never been before, that it was possible both to love her mother more than anyone in life and yet be driven mad by her presence,”
― Caroline Moorehead, Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life

“As a traveller,” she wrote, “I have learned that it is wise not to return to what was once perfection.”
― Caroline Moorehead, Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life

“Houses were a particular nightmare for her, bringing into play two of the most conflicting forces in her nature: absolute dependence on living in surroundings that were both very comfortable and totally to her own taste; and an absolute distaste for the kind of work that went into making them so.”
― Caroline Moorehead, Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life

“but travel, to new places where she could swim and write, while escaping the ensnaring kitchen of life, was becoming the one prospect that unfailingly brought the promise of pleasure.”
― Caroline Moorehead, Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life

“she admired the strength and kindness with which he handled his wife’s suicide attempts, saying that it taught her that all of life, including the filthy bits, could in some way nourish the human spirit.”
― Caroline Moorehead, Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life

“One thing time has not removed from me,” she wrote to Grover, “the last toughness of youth, and that is to live alone. I am glad of that; I would be scared to death if I found I was really needing people.” One”
― Caroline Moorehead, Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life

“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”
― Caroline Moorehead, Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life