Martha Gellhorn: Quotes by a Courageous Woman
By Taylor Jasmine | On November 3, 2017 | Updated November 16, 2024 | Comments (2)
Are you in the mood for some gutsy quotes? Martha Gellhorn (1908 – 1998) was best known as an American war correspondent, though she was a prolific writer of fiction and memoir as well. She was the third wife of iconic American author Ernest Hemingway.
Gellhorn is ranked among the top war journalists of the twentieth century — and didn’t wish to be merely remembered as one of the four wives of “Papa” Hemingway. Famously, she lamented, “Why should I be a footnote to somebody else’s life?”
Indeed, she was enormously accomplished in her own right, having covered nearly every global conflict spanning the twentieth century.
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Learn more about Martha Gellhorn
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Is Martha Gellhorn and her courageous, adventurous life as well-remembered as it should be? I’d argue that it’s not. Here are just a few highlights as an introduction to those who aren’t familiar with her.
- She dropped out of Bryn Mawr college and began working as a crime reporter before embarking on a journey to Paris, where she worked for the United Press bureau as a foreign correspondent.
- During the Depression, Gellhorn worked as an investigator for the Federal Relief Administration, as one of few women doing this kind of work.
- Gellhorn met Ernest Hemingway in the mid-1930s, and they traveled together to cover the Spanish Civil War. She became his third wife when the two married in 1940, though the marriage lasted only a few years. His fragile ego couldn’t take her commitment to her work.
- Gellhorn traveled to war zones throughout World War II and was the only female journalist at Normandy on D-Day in June of 1944 (famously, Hemingway thwarted her passage, but she locked herself into a ships’s bathroom until safely out at sea).
- She covered nearly every global conflict in her 60-year career, from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam and beyond, and is considered one of the greatest war correspondents of the twentieth century.
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Travels with Myself and Another
by Martha Gellhorn (1978)
“We need a root of personal experience from which to grow our understanding. Each new experience plants another root; the smallest root will serve.”
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“Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.”
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“I had a sudden notion of why history is such a mess: humans do not live long enough. We only learn from experience and have no time to use it in a continuous and sensible way.”
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That state of grace which can rightly be called happiness, when body and mind rejoice together. This occurs, as a divine surprise, in travel; this is why I will never finish traveling.
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“Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was honey, appetizing, a habit.”
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“Solitude is all right with books, awful without.”
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“Always delighted to grab any privileges I can get, I don’t like the sense of being privileged by law.”
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“Loving is a habit like another and requires something nearby for daily practice.”
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Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
by Caroline Moorehead (2003)
“It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.”
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“The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.”
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“The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.”
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“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.”
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“If I practiced sex, out of moral conviction, that was one thing; but to enjoy it … seemed a defeat … all I got was a pleasure of being wanted, I suppose, and the tenderness (not nearly enough) that a man gives when he is satisfied. I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents.”
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“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.”
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Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn (2006)
“I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.”
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“It is much harder to be lonely, when you have for a while stopped being lonely. I was used to having only myself, cold and hard as that is; I could live with it. And now I wait, for a voice, a face, a body, that is not going to be here, is not mine, does not in any case wait as I do, nor share this homesickness.”
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“How to explain that I taught myself to be tough and indifferent, because it mattered too much and learned not even to weep in my mind not to notice.”
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“Life is not long at all, never long enough, but days are very long indeed.”
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“Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.” (Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, 2006)
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“If there is a war, then all of the things most of us do won’t matter any more. I have a feeling that one has to work all day and all night and live too, and swim and get the sun one’s hair and laugh and love as many people as one can find around and do this all terribly fast, because the time getting shorter and shorter every day.”
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“War happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say and it seems to me I have been saying it forever. Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business.”
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“People do not yet realize (because the mind isn’t built that way) what war can be. They fear it but surely they fear it the way children fear nightmares, dimly, without definite images in their heads of how it will all work out.”
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The Face of War (1959)
“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.”
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“As citizens, I think we all have an exhausting duty to now what our governments are up to, and it is cowardice or laziness to ask: what can I do about it anyway? Every squeak counts, if only in self-respect.”
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“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.”
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“Politics really must be a rotten profession considering what awful moral cowards most politicians become as soon as they get the job.”
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Have just read Beautiful Exiles by Meg Waite Clayton, who introduced me to Ms Gellhorn. I highly recommend that book to those who already know her. Can’t wait to dig in to as much Gellhorn as I can lay my hands on.
Thanks for the comment; she’s a journalist and writer who shouldn’t be forgotten!