Margaret Mitchell > Quotes

“Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“No, I don't think I will kiss you, although you need kissing, badly. That's what's wrong with you. You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“My dear, I don't give a damn.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“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.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“Burdens are for shoulders strong enough to carry them.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“I Can't think about that right now. If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“Sir,"she said,"you are no gentleman!"

An apt observation,"he answered airily."And, you, Miss, are no lady.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“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. ”
― Margaret Mitchell

“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. ”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“After all, tomorrow is another day!”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“With enough courage, you can do without a reputation.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“I'd cut up my heart for you to wear if you wanted it.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“Death, taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“Never pass up new experiences [Scarlett], They enrich the mind." - Rhett Butler”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“Dear Scarlett! You aren't helpless. Anyone as selfish and determined as you are is never helpless. God help the Yankees if they should get you." -Rhett Butler”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“it was better to know the worst than to wonder.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“Hardships make or break people.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“Great balls of fire. Don't bother me anymore, and don't call me sugar.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“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!”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“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. ”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“Vanity was stronger than love at sixteen and there was no room in her hot heart now for anything but hate.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“Her lips on his could tell him better than all her stumbling words.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“The land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it's the only thing that lasts".....Gerald O'Hara, Gone With The Wind.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“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....”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“As she chattered and laughed and cast quick glances into the house and the yard, her eyes fell on a stranger, standing alone in the hall, staring at her in a cool impertinent way that brought her up sharply with a mingled feeling of feminine pleasure that she had attracted a man and an embarrassed sensation that her dress was too low in the bosom. He looked quite old, at least thirty-five. He was a tall man and powerfully built. Scarlett thought she had never seen such a man with such wide shoulders, so heavy with muscles, almost too heavy for gentility. When her eye caught his, he smiled, showing animal-white teeth below a close-clipped black mustache. He was dark of face, swarthy as a pirate, and his eyes were as bold and black as any pirate's appraising a galleon to be scuttled or a maiden to be ravished. There was a cool recklessness in his face and a cynical humor in his mouth as he smiled at her, and Scarlett caught her breath. She felt that she should be insulted by such a look as was annoyed with herself because she did not feel insulted. She did not know who he could be, but there was undeniably a look of good blood in his dark face. It showed in the thin hawk nose over the full red lips, and high forehead and the wide-set eyes.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“You're so brutal to those who love you, Scarlett. You take their love and hold it over their heads like a whip.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“How wonderful to know someone who was bad and dishonorable and a cheat and a liar, when all the world was filled with people who would not lie to save their souls and who would rather starve than do a dishonorable deed!”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“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. ”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“Men and women, they were beautiful and wild, all a little violent under their pleasant ways and only a little tamed.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Przemine̜ło Z Wiatrem

“If I said I was madly in love with you you'd know I was lying.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“I will think about that tomorrow!”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“I've always had a weakness for lost causes once they're really lost.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“In a weak moment, I have written a book.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“Hunger gnawed at her empty stomach again and she said aloud: 'As God is my witness, and God is my witness, the Yankees aren't going to lick me. I'm going to live through this, and when it's over, I'm never going to be hungry again. No, nor any of my folks. If I have to steal or kill - as God is my witness, I'm never going to be hungry again.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“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.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, Part 2 of 2

“life was not easy, nor was it happy, but she did not expect life to be easy, and, if it was not happy, that was woman's lot. It was a man's world, and she accepted it as such. The man owned the property, and the woman managed it. The man took credit for the management, and the woman praised his cleverness. The man roared like a bull when a splinter was in his finger, and the woman muffled the moans of childbirth, lest she disturb him. Men were rough of speech and often drunk. Women ignored the lapses of speech and put the drunkards to bed without bitter words. Men were rude and outspoken, women were always kind, gracious and forgiving.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“I wish I could care what you do or where you go but I can't..My dear, I don't give a damn.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“Scarlett, always save something to fear-even as you save something to love.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“Make up your mind to this. If you are different, you are isolated, not only from people of your own age but from those of your parents' generation and from your children's generation too. They'll never understand you and they'll be shocked no matter what you do. But your grandparents would probably be proud of you and say: 'Theres a chip off the old block,' and your grandchildren will sigh enviously and say: 'What an old rip Grandma must have been!' and they'll try to be like you.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“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.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“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.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“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.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“And apologies, once postponed, become harder and harder to make, and finally impossible.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“That's what's wrong with you. You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how."-Rhett Butler”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“How closely women clutch the very chains that bind them!”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“I wish to Heaven I was married," she said resentfully as she attacked the yams with loathing. "I'm tired of everlastingly being unnatural and never doing anything I want to do. I'm tired of acting like I don't eat more than a bird, and walking when I want to run and saying I feel faint after a waltz, when I could dance for two days and never get tired. 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... I can't eat another bite.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“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.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

“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.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“Scarlet O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin-that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind