Martha Gellhorn

“In the last camp they all ate grass, until the authorities forbade them to pull it up. They were accustomed to having the fruits of their little communal gardens stolen by the guards, after they had done all the work; but at the last camp everything was stolen.”

“I didn't write. I just wandered about.”

“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.”

“No wars, in the war-logged record of our species, have been terminal. Until now, when we know that nuclear war would be the death of our planet. It is beyond belief that any governments–those brief political figures–arrogate to themselves the right to stop history, at their discretion.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.”

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

“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.”

“I found out about the Spanish war because I was in Germany when it began.”

“It is high time that I learn to be more careful about hope, a reckless emotion for travelers. The sensible approach would be to the expect the worst, the very worst, that way you avoid grievous disappointment and who knows with a tiny bit of luck, you might even have a moderately pleasant surprise, like the difference between hell and purgatory.”

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

“And though various organizations in America and England collected money and sent food parcels to these refugees, nothing was ever received by the Spanish.”

“It is alleged that half a million Spanish men, women and children fled to France after the Franco victory.”

“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.”

“I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.”

“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.”

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