Margaret mitchell quotes

Suddenly she felt strong and happy. She was not afraid of the darkness or the fog and she knew with a singing in her heart that she would never fear them again. No matter what mists might curl around her in the future, she knew her refuge. She started briskly up the street toward home and the blocks seemed very long. Far, far too long. She caught up her skirts to her knees and began to run lightly. But this time she was not running from fear. She was running because Rhett's arms were at the end of the street.

It had been so long since she had seen him and she had lived on memories until they were worn thin.

What’s broken is broken—and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I live…I’m too old to believe in such sentimentalities as clean slates and starting all over.

I want to make you faint. I will make you faint. You've had this coming to you for years. None of the fools you've known have kissed you like this - have they? Your precious Charles or Frank or your stupid Ashley... I said your stupid Ashley. Gentlemen all - what do they know about women? What do they know about you? I know you.

In the end what will happen will be what has happened whenever a civilization breaks up. The people who have brains and courage come through and the ones who haven't are winnowed out.

She was darkness and he was darkness and there had never been anything before this time, only darkness and his lips upon her. She tried to speak and his mouth was over hers again. Suddenly she had a wild thrill such as she had never known; joy, fear, madness, excitement, surrender to arms that were too strong, lips too bruising, fate that moved too fast.

The whole world can't lick us but we can lick ourselves by longing too hard for things we haven't got any more - and by remembering too much.

After all, tomorrow is another day.

I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'll never understand or forgive myself. And if a bullet gets me, so help me, I'll laugh at myself for being an idiot. There's one thing I do know... and that is that I love you, Scarlett. In spite of you and me and the whole silly world going to pieces around us, I love you. Because we're alike. Bad lots, both of us. Selfish and shrewd. But able to look things in the eyes as we call them by their right names.

But Rhett, you mustn't bring me anything else so expensive. It's awfully kind of you, but I really couldn't accept anything else." "Indeed? Well, I shall bring you presents so long as it pleases me and so long as I see things that will enhance your charms. I shall bring you dark-green watered silk for a frock to match the bonnet. And I warn you that I am not kind. I am tempting you with bonnets and bangles and leading you into a pit. Always remember I never do anything without reason and I never give anything without expecting something in return. I always get paid.

I'd cut up my heart for you to wear if you wanted it.

It was better to know the worst than to wonder.

Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.

I can't think about that right now. If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow.

I won't think of it now. I can't stand it now. I'll think of it later.

You must be more gentle, dear, more sedate,' Ellen told her daughter. 'You must not interrupt gentlemen when they are speaking, even if you do think you know more about matters than they do. Gentlemen do not like forward girls.

The liar was the hottest to defend his veracity, the coward his courage, the ill-bred his gentlemanliness, and the cad his honor

The Old Guard dies but it never surrenders.

Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was.

[Yankees] are pretty much like southerners except with worse manners, of course, and terrible accents.

You're so brutal to those who love you, Scarlett. You take their love and hold it over their heads like a whip.

Well, my dear, take heart. Some day, I will kiss you and you will like it. But not now, so I beg you not to be too impatient.

He had never known such gallantry as the gallantry of Scarlett O'Hara going forth to conquer the world in her mother's velvet curtains and the tail feathers of a rooster.

The world can forgive practically anything except people who mind their own business.

The green eyes in the carefully sweet face were turbulent, willful, lusty with life, distinctly at variance with her decorous demeanor. Her manners had been imposed upon her ... her eyes were her own.

I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.

Practically everybody is suing everybody else these days.

Every problem has two handles. You can grab it by the handle of fear or the handle of hope.

The usual masculine dissillusionment is discovering that a woman has a brain

It was not often that she was alone like this and she did not like it. When she was alone she had to think and, these days, thoughts were not so pleasant.

[T]he merciful adjustment which nature makes when what cannot be cured must be endured.

To Scarlett, there was something breath-taking about Ellen O'Hara, a miracle that lived in the house with her and awed her and charmed and soothed her.

. . . She knew only that if she did or said thus-and-so, men would unerringly respond with the complimentary thus-and-so. It was like a mathematical formula and no more difficult, for mathematics was the one subject that had come easy to Scarlett in her schooldays.

There'll always be wars because men love wars. Women don't, but men do.

I bare my soul and you are suspicious! No, Scarlett, this is a bona fide honorable declaration. I admit that it's not in the best of taste, coming at this time, but I have a very good excuse for my lack of breeding. I'm going away tomorrow for a long time and I fear that if I wait till I return you'll have married some one else with a little money. So I thought, why not me and my money? Really, Scarlett, I can't go all my life waiting to catch you between husbands.

Say you’ll marry me when I come back or, before God, I won’t go. I’ll stay around here and play a guitar under your window every night and sing at the top of my voice and compromise you, so you’ll have to marry me to save your reputation.

What most people don't seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one.

And apologies, once postponed, become harder and harder to make, and finally impossible.

I can't make you understand because you don't know the meaning of fear. You have the heart of a lion and an utter lack of imagination and I envy you both of those qualities. You'll never mind facing realities and you'll never want to escape from them as I do.

You're like the thief who isn't the least bit sorry he stole, but is terribly, terribly sorry he's going to jail. - Rhett Butler

Burdens are for shoulders strong enough to carry them.

She is the only dream I ever had that lived and breathed and did not die in the face of reality." (Ashley said about Melanie)

Death, taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them.

Brilliance is one part talent, two parts wisdom and three parts passion.

She hasn't your strength. She's never had any strength. She's never had anything but heart.

The Irish are the damnedest race. They put so much emphasis on so many wrong things.

Once, when she was six years old, she had fallen from a tree, flat on her stomach. She could still recall that sickening interval before breath came back into her body. Now, as she looked at him, she felt the same way she had felt then, breathless, stunned, nauseated.

His voice stopped and they looked for a long quiet moment into each other's eyes and between them lay the sunny lost youth that they had so unthinkingly shared.

I do not write with ease, nor am I ever pleased with anything I write. And so I rewrite.

Anyone as selfish and determined as you are is never helpless.

I loved something I made up

Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.

It's not because I've -what is the phrase? -'swept you off your feet' by my -er- ardor?

Like most girls, her imagination carried her just as far as the altar and no further.

Southerners can never resist a losing cause.

Supposed I don't want to redeem myself? Why should I fight to uphold the system that cast me out? I shall take pleasure in seeing it smashed.

But the small cloud which appeared in the northwest four months ago had blown up into a mighty storm and then into a screaming tornado,sweeping away her world, whirling her out of her sheltered life,and dropping her down in the midst of this still,haunted desolation.

Her lips on his could tell him better than all her stumbling words.

My age is my own private business and I intend to keep it so - if I can. I am not so old that I am ashamed of my age and I am not so young that I couldn't have written my book and that is all the public needs to know about my age.

People must do what they must do. We all don't think alike or act alike and it's wrong to-to judge others by ourselves.

There ain't nothin' from the outside can lick any of us.

He made her play and she had almost forgotten how. Life had been so serious and so bitter. He knew how to play and swept her along with him.

Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything, for 'Tis the only thing in this world that lasts, 'Tis the only thing worth working for, worth fighting for - worth dying for.

Scarlett's mind went back through the years to the still hot noon at Tara when grey smoke curled above a blue-clad body and Melanie stood at the top of the stairs with Charles' sabre in her hand. Scarlett remembered that she had thought at the time: 'How silly! Melly couldn't even heft that sword!' But now she knew that had the necessity arisen, Melanie would have charged down those stairs and killed the Yankee - or been killed herself.

Some mistakes are too much fun to make only once.

Fighting is like champagne. It goes to the heads of cowards as quickly as of heroes. Any fool can be brave on a battlefield when it's be brave or else be killed.

Never pass up new experiences [Scarlett], They enrich the mind." - Rhett Butler

In a weak moment, I have written a book.

Sir" said Mrs. Meade indignantly. "There are NO deserters in the Confederate army." "I beg your pardon," said Rhett with mock humility. "I meant those thousands on furlough who FORGOT to rejoin their regiments and those who have been over their wounds for six months but who remain at home, going about their usual business or doing the spring plowing.

Sometimes Frank sighed, thinking he had caught a tropic bird, all flame and jewel color, when a wren would have served him just as well. In fact, much better.

But she knew that no matter what beauty lay behind, it must remain there. No one could go forward with a load of aching memories.

And if we folks have a motto, it's this: 'Don't holler - smile and bide your time.' We've survived a passel of things that way, smiling and biding our time, and we've gotten to be experts at surviving.

Vanity was stronger than love at sixteen and there was no room in her hot heart now for anything but hate.

I'm tempting you with fine gifts until your girlish ideals are quite worn away and you are at my mercy.

Forgive me for startling you with the impetuosity of my sentiments, my dear Scarlett—I mean, my dear Mrs. Kennedy. It cannot have escaped your notice that for some time past the friendship I have had in my heart for you has ripened into a deeper feeling, a feeling more beautiful, more pure, more sacred. Dare I name it you? Ah! It is love which makes me so bold!

Yes, I want money more than anything else in the world.” “Then you’ve made the only choice. But there’s a penalty attached, as there is to most things you want. It’s loneliness.

I won't need you to rescue meM. I can take care of myself, thank you. - Scarlett O'Hara.

How closely women clutch the very chains that bind them!

If! If! If! There were so many ifs in life, never any sense of security, always the dread of losing everything.

If I said I was madly in love with you, I'd be lying and what's more, you'd know it.

So it was true! A pain slashed at her heart as savagely as a wild animal's fangs.

No, my dear, I'm not in love with you, no more than you are with me, and if I were, you would be the last person I'd ever tell. God help the man who ever really loves you. You'd break his heart, my darling, cruel, destructive little cat who is so careless and confident she doesn't even trouble to sheathe her claws.

I'll think of it tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. Tomorrow, I'll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.

men are so conceited they’ll believe anything that flatters them

I was right when I said I'd never look back. It hurts too much, it drags at your heart till you can't ever do anything else except look back.

No matter what rallying cries the orators give to the idiots who fight, no matter what noble purposes they assign to wars, there is never but one reason for a war. And that is money. All wars are in reality money squabbles.

The happiest days are when babies come.

I don't see how it could possibly be made into a movie unless the entire book was scrapped and Shirley Temple cast as 'Bonnie,' Mae West as 'Belle,' and Stepin Fetchit as 'Uncle Peter.'

All wars are sacred to those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn't make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight?

All you have done is to be different from other women and you have made a little success of it. This is unforgivable sin in any society. The mere fact that you have succeed to run the mill is an insult to everyman who hasn't succeed.

Now she had a fumbling knowledge that, had she ever understood Ashley, she would never have loved him; had she ever understood Rhett, she would never have lost him.

All she wanted was a breathing space in which to hurt.

Everybody's mainspring is different. And I want to say this - folks whose mainsprings are busted are better dead.

It doesn’t matter who you marry, as long as he thinks like you and is a gentleman and a Southerner and prideful. For a woman, love comes after marriage.” “Oh, Pa, that’s such an Old Country notion!” “And a good notion it is! All this American business of running around marrying for love, like servants, like Yankees! The best marriages are when the parents choose for the girl. For how can a silly piece like yourself tell a good man from a scoundrel?

She could not ignore life. She had to live it and it was too brutal, too hostile, for her even to try to gloss over its harshness with a smile

I'm tired of saying, "How wonderful you are!" to fool men who haven't got one-half the sense I've got, and I'm tired of pretending I don't know anything, so men can tell me things and feel important while they're doing it.

Hush," he said. "I am asking you to marry me. Would you be convinced if I knelt down?

Times were so hard it was difficult to feed and lodge humans, much less animals.

Child, it's a very bad thing for a woman to face the worst that can happen to her, because after she's faced the worst she can't ever really fear anything again. ...Scarlett, always save something to fear - even as you save something to love.

I will think about that tomorrow!

Men and women, they were beautiful and wild, all a little violent under their pleasant ways and only a little tamed.

The way to get a man interested and to hold his interest was to talk about himself, and then gradually lead the conversation around yourself—and keep it there.

Did you ever hear the Oriental proverb, "The dogs bark but the caravan passes on"? Let them bark, Scarlett. I fear nothing will stop your caravan.

you can go to the Devil and not at your leisure. You can go now, for all I care.' 'My pet, I've been to the Devil and he's a very dull fellow. I won't go there again, not even for you.

I wonder if anyone but me realizes what goes on in that head back of your deceptively sweet face.

Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect. We take what we get and are thankful it's no worse than it is.

I've found out that money is the most important thing in the world and, as God is my witness, I don't ever intend to be without it again. I'll never be hungry again.

Perhaps - I want the old days back again and they'll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears.

I've always had a weakness for lost causes once they're really lost.

They knew that love snatched in the face of danger and death was doubly sweet for the strange excitement that went with it.

I'm tired of saying "How wonderful you are!" to fool men, who haven't got one half sense I've got.

I want peace. I want to see if somewhere there isn't something left in life of charm and grace.

Hardships make or break people.

They were always like two people talking to each other in different languages. But she loved him so much, when he withdrew as he had now done, it was like the warm sun going down and leaving her in chilly twilight dews.

With enough courage, you can do without a reputation.

If Gone With the Wind has a theme it is that of survival. What makes some people come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong, and brave, go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don't. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those that go under? I only know that survivors used to call that quality 'gumption.' So I wrote about people who had gumption and people who didn't.

I'm riding you with a slack rein, my pet, but don't forget that I'm riding with curb and spurs just the same.

Now you are beginning to think for yourself instead of letting others think for you. That’s the beginning of wisdom.

I loved something I made up, something that's just as dead as Melly is. I made a pretty suit of clothes and fell in love with it. And when Ashley came riding along, so handsome, so different, I put that suit on him and made him wear it whether it fitted him or not. And I wouldn't see what he really was. I kept on loving the pretty clothes—and not him at all.

Why will people persist in reading strange meanings into the simplest of story? Is it not enough that a writer can entertain for a few hours with narrative without being suspected of 'significances' or symbolism or 'social trends'?

All really nice girls wonder when men don't try to kiss them. They know they shouldn't want them to and they know they must act insulted if they do, but just the same, they wish the men would try.

That is the one unforgivable sin in any society. Be different and be damned!

It was this feminine conspiracy which made Southern society so pleasant. Women knew that a land where men were contented, uncontradicted ans safe in possession of unpunctured vanity was likely to be a very pleasant place for women to live. So, from the cradle to the grave, women strove to make men pleased with themselves, and the satisfied men repaid lavishly with gallantry and adoration. In fact, men willingly gave ladies everything in the world except credit for having intelligence.

Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything.

It is axiomatic among writers that no one ever sues the writer of an unsuccessful book. Just let a book go over twenty-five thousand copies and it is surprising how many people's feelings are hurt, how many screwballs think their brain children have been stolen, and how many people feel that they have been portrayed in a manner calculated to bring infamy upon them.