Quotes from Caroline Moorehead

Horribly aware of what was happening, conscious, as she had never been before, that it was possible both to love her mother more than anyone in life and yet be driven mad by her presence

I had to hold fast to the end, and die of living.

Cornered, she seemed to possess no mechanism for behaving well. By the same token, when not trapped or obliged to confront people or situations that upset her, she had a particular ability to think about them with apparently genuine pleasure. Martha

I am not lonely, living this way, because I have given up expecting that loneliness can be blotted out by anyone else; my loneliness is my own cherished possession and probably my only one.

Neither de Gaulle nor anyone else was keen to admit that much of France had not only tolerated anti-Semitism and xenophobia but actually anticipated German wishes in identifying and deporting Jews. (Moorehead, 2011, 305)

The Allied Forces, on their way across France during 1944 and 1945, had consumed scarce food, vandalized, looted and raped, and their destructiveness and rapaciousness was everywhere compared to that of the German soldiers. (Moorehead, 2011, 306)

but travel, to new places where she could swim and write, while escaping the ensnaring kitchen of life, was becoming the one prospect that unfailingly brought the promise of pleasure.

Houses were a particular nightmare for her, bringing into play two of the most conflicting forces in her nature: absolute dependence on living in surroundings that were both very comfortable and totally to her own taste; and an absolute distaste for the kind of work that went into making them so.

I live alongside it. Auschwitz is there, unalterable, precise, but enveloped in the skin of memory.' (Moorehead, 2011, 316)

Looking at me, one would think that I'm alive…I'm not alive. I died in Auschwitz, but no one knows it'. (Moorehead, 2011, 317)

she admired the strength and kindness with which he handled his wife's suicide attempts, saying that it taught her that all of life, including the filthy bits, could in some way nourish the human spirit.

Voltaire… A true Aryan must be blond like Hitler, slender like Göring, tall like Goebbels, young like Pétain, and honest like Laval.

This is a book about friendship between women, and the importance that they attach to intimacy and to looking after each other, and about how, under conditions of acute hardship and danger, such mutual dependency can make the difference between living and dying. It is about courage, facing and surviving the worst that life can offer, with dignity and an unassailable determination not to be destroyed.

When the Marchese de Caracciolo wrote to the King of Naples that in England he had discovered a country of '22 religions and two sauces', these were not words of praise.

I am not lonely, living this way, because I have given up expecting that loneliness can be blotted out by anyone else; my loneliness is my own cherished possession and probably my only one." — Martha Gellhorn, in a letter to Campbell Beckett, from Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

We weren't victims,' Madeleine Dissoubray would later say. 'It wasn't like the Jews or the gypsies. We saw the German posters, we read about the penalties, we heard about the torture. We knew what we were doing. It was our choice, and this gave us a strong emotional link.' (Moorehead, 2011, 161)

Deuteronomy, 'I command you [to protect the refugee] lest innocent blood be shed.

Many years later, Martha revisited the same Caribbean islands. She found yachts and rubber Zodiac dinghies, plastic bottles on the seabed, casinos and boutiques in the sleepy ports, and great bald patches of land, stripped for development, where once all had been jungle and green. It was, she wrote sadly, a world lost. Returning

The wrong which we seek to condemn and punish,' said Taylor, 'have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive it being repeated.' (Moorehead, 2011, 299)

Look at me, because in my eyes you will see hundreds of thousands of eyes staring at you, and in my voice you will hear hundreds of thousands of voices accusing you.' (Moorehead, 2011, 300)

One thing time has not removed from me," she wrote to Grover, "the last toughness of youth, and that is to live alone. I am glad of that; I would be scared to death if I found I was really needing people." One