Gone with the Wind

by Margaret Mitchell

No wife has ever changed a husband one whit, and don’t you be forgetting that.

She had never seen a bad woman before and she twisted her head and stared after her until she was lost in the crowd.

“I am not afraid of danger or capture or wounds or even death, if death must come, but I do fear that once this war is over, we will never get back to the old times. And I belong in those old times. I do not belong in this mad present of killing and I fear I will not fit into any future, try though I may. Nor will you, my dear, for you and I are of the same blood. I do not know what the future will bring, but it cannot be as beautiful or as satisfying as the past.

We should have paid heed to cynics like Butler who knew, instead of statesmen who felt — and talked.

“It isn’t the darkies, Scarlett. They’re just the excuse. There’ll always be wars because men love wars. Women don’t, but men do — yea, passing the love of women.”

“You are the most barbarously ignorant young person I ever saw.

He was needed, like the young men, and he was doing a young man’s work.

Throughout the South for fifty years there would be bitter-eyed women who looked backward, to dead times, to dead men, evoking memories that hurt and were futile, bearing poverty with bitter pride because they had those memories. But Scarlett was never to look back.

“Times never change when there’s a need for honest work to be done,” stated the sharp-eyed old lady, refusing to be soothed. “And I’m ashamed for your mother, Scarlett, to hear you stand there and talk as though honest work made white trash out of nice people.