The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Martha Gellhorn

Martha Gellhorn

Why do people talk of the horrors of old age? It’s great. I feel like a fine old car with the parts gradually wearing out, but I’m not complaining,… Those who find growing old terrible are people who haven’t done what they wanted with their lives.

Car, Great, Old Age

Martha Gellhorn

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.

Know, Said, See

Martha Gellhorn

Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.

overcoming, self-esteem, survival

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

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.

books, packing, travel

Martha Gellhorn

… 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.

experience, exposure, soviet-russia, travel

Martha Gellhorn

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

happiness-through-travel, travel, travel-again

Martha Gellhorn

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

cowardice, morals, politicians

Martha Gellhorn

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

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.

communism, oppression, poland

Martha Gellhorn

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.

politicians, power, war

Martha Gellhorn

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.