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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

Martha Gellhorn

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Martha Gellhorn
Age: 89 †
Born: 1908
Born: November 8
Died: 1998
Died: February 15
Journalist
Novelist
War Correspondent
Writer
St. Louis
Missouri
Martha Ellis Gellhorn
Writing
Suggested
Somebody
Understand
War
Write
Didn
Anything

More quotes by Martha Gellhorn

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[On Paris:] I do not know any city so beautiful and you can be unhappy there and notice your unhappiness less, having the city to look at.
Martha Gellhorn
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Public opinion, though slow as lava, in the end forces governments towards more sanity, more justice. My heroes and heroines are all private citizens.
Martha Gellhorn
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the ends never justify the means because IT never ends.
Martha Gellhorn
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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.
Martha Gellhorn
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the private conscience is the last and only protection of the civilized world.
Martha Gellhorn
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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.
Martha Gellhorn
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I found out about the Spanish war because I was in Germany when it began.
Martha Gellhorn
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All amateur travellers have experienced horror journeys, long or short, sooner or later, one way or another. As a student of disaster, I note that we react alike to our tribulations: frayed and bitter at the time, proud afterwards. Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.
Martha Gellhorn
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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.
Martha Gellhorn
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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.
Martha Gellhorn
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I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.
Martha Gellhorn
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Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.
Martha Gellhorn
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Life is not long at all, never long enough, but days are very long indeed.
Martha Gellhorn
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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.
Martha Gellhorn
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After a lifetime of war-watching, I see war as an endemic human disease, and governments are the carriers.
Martha Gellhorn
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It is alleged that half a million Spanish men, women and children fled to France after the Franco victory.
Martha Gellhorn
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Joseph McCarthy, the Junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin, ruled America like devil king for four years. His purges were an American mirror image of Stalin's purges, an unnoticed similarity.
Martha Gellhorn
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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.
Martha Gellhorn
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My definition of what makes a journey wholly or partially horrible is boredom.
Martha Gellhorn
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Once you get a tyranny, you don't easily get rid of it. Much better to remember about eternal vigilance.
Martha Gellhorn