...when you stumble across something like this:

Who is the judge that sits perpetually in your head? Write those lines, you silly fool, they are all yours, both the good and the bad, and no one exists in purity and essence. Write the bad lines if only to keep writing... Writing is longely, wretched, unheralded, often meaningless, insignificant, and too often devoid of even a masturbatory pleasure, mean though that is. Write, Martha, and stop crying at the cold. You've wept long enough.

Robert Presnell to Martha Gellhorn, 1953

Emma

That's beautiful. I'm ashamed to say I have never heard of Robert Presnell before, but that man can write!

No, I hadn't either. I'm reading Caroline Moorhead's terrific biography of Martha Gellhorn, which describes him as 'a former journalist and playwrite'.

Emma

<Added>

tsk! Playwright

Actually, Emma, I like that so much I'm going to print it out and stick it on the wall! Many thanks.

Me too. I really needed that.

Myrtle

I want a man to write letters like that to me!

Cath

Another payoff from goofing off - I've just (along with four others) won one of those Guardian Books competitions that are so easy to enter - like the one to win the Orange prize list, well no, not that one, but two books connected with Edgar Allen Poe - The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl and a new Vintage collection of three short mysteries by Poe - hurray!

Frances

Frances, you clever thing, you! Well done.

I don't think even having someone to write to you like that would be worth being Gellhorn for. What a fascinating, maddening, ultimately deeply sad life.

Emma