Love & Passion Quote by Martha Gellhorn

A line like this lands because it detonates the usual mythos around Martha Gellhorn: war correspondent as hardened legend, romanticized in the same frame as the men she out-reported. Instead she reaches for the smallest, most domestic humiliation imaginable, then scales it to absurdity: five continents. The joke is logistical bravado harnessed to self-derision. It’s also a sly flex. To be the “worst” bed partner across that much geography, you have to have been there, awake, moving, living at speed.

Gellhorn’s intent reads as preemptive demystification. Her public story is inevitably entangled with Hemingway and with the masculine prestige economy of war writing. By making herself ridiculous in private, she steals oxygen from the more predictable narrative hooks: the great lover, the tragic muse, the exceptional woman who proves she can keep up. The subtext is almost spitefully practical: I didn’t build my life around being pleasing. If intimacy failed, it failed in service of the work, the restlessness, the refusal to perform softness.

The phrasing “I daresay” is key. It’s an old-fashioned verbal shrug that feigns modesty while sharpening the blade. She’s not confessing for absolution; she’s choosing the terms of disclosure. In context, coming from a journalist whose career required proximity without surrender, the line becomes a miniature manifesto: don’t mistake access for availability, and don’t confuse a woman’s legend with her willingness to be easy.