List of Martha Gellhorn Quotes

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.

I Didn't Write. I Just Wandered About.

[on The United States:] We Are A Wildly Energetic People In Our Pursuit Of Pleasure, Let Alone In Our Pursuit Of Money, And We Are Very Odd To Look At As We Go About Our Lives.

I Found Out About The Spanish War Because I Was In Germany When It Began.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Ends Never Justify The Means Because It Never Ends.

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.

If I Practised Sex, Out Of Moral Conviction, That Was One Thing; But To Enjoy It... Seemed A Defeat.