Martha Gellhorn Quotes & Sayings

“Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.”

“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.”

“I see mysteries and complications wherever I look, and I have never met a steadily logical person.”

“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.”

“The road passed through a curtain of pine forest and came out on a flat, rolling snow field. In this field the sprawled or bunched bodies of Germans lay thick, like some dark shapeless vegetable.”

“It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.”

“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.”

“If I practised sex, out of moral conviction, that was one thing; but to enjoy it... seemed a defeat.”

“Thousand got away to other countries; thousands returned to Spain tempted by false promises of kindness. By the tens of thousands, these Spaniards died of neglect in the concentration camps.”

“I only knew about daily life. It was said, well, it isn't everybody's daily life. That is why I started.”