Martha Gellhorn

Martha Ellis Gellhorn (8 November 1908 – 15 February 1998) was an American war correspondent and novelist. She covered nearly every war during the twentieth century.

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

Quotes

• 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.
  • Notebook entry, quoted in Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life (2003) by Caroline Moorehead, p. 88.

• 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.
  • Letter as quoted in Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life (2003) written by Caroline Moorehead, pg. 142.

• 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. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.
  • Letter as quoted in Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life (2003) written by Caroline Moorehead.

• Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.
  • Travels with Myself and Another: A Memoir (1978) by Martha Gellhorn.

External links

• Martha Gellhorn at Kirjasto
• Review: Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn (Salon.com)
• Review of "Martha Gellhorn: A Life" in The Age (17 January 2004)
• Martha Gellhorn talks about the Spanish Civil War (BBC Radio 4)
• Electric Sky - 'Martha Gellhorn - On The Record'
• "Martha Gellhorn" by Angie Dorman