Gone with the Wind

by Margaret Mitchell

She meant what she said, for she could never long endure any conversation of which she was not the chief subject.

Cotton was the heartbeat of the section, the planting and the picking were the diastole and systole of the red earth. Wealth came out of the curving furrows, and arrogance came too—arrogance built on green bushes and the acres of fleecy white.

As usual in the very young, she marveled that people could be so selfishly oblivious to her pain and the world rock along just the same, in spite of her heartbreak.

She lay in the silvery shadows with courage rising and made the plans that a sixteen-year-old makes when life has been so pleasant that defeat is an impossibility and a pretty dress and a clear complexion are weapons to vanquish fate.

They were all beautiful with the blinding beauty that transfigures even the plainest woman when she is utterly protected and utterly loved and is giving back that love a thousandfold.

Until you’ve lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.”

Her love was still a young girl’s adoration for a man she could not understand, a man who possessed all the qualities she did not own but which she admired.

If the people who started wars didn’t make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight?

Never pass up new experiences, Scarlett. They enrich the mind.”

Some day I’ll tell you with embellishments just where and how I stole him and how narrowly I missed getting shot. Nothing but my devotion to you would make me, at this stage of my career, turn horse thief—and thief of such a horse. Let me help you in.”

“I love you, Scarlett, because we are so much alike, renegades, both of us, dear, and selfish rascals. Neither of us cares a rap if the whole world goes to pot, so long as we are safe and comfortable.”

Was Tara still standing? Or was Tara also gone with the wind which had swept through Georgia?

all looking to her for strength, for guidance, all reading in her straight back courage she did not possess and strength which had long since failed.

Malign fate had broken their necks, perhaps, but never their hearts. They had not whined, they had fought. And when they died, they died spent but unquenched. All of those shadowy folks whose blood flowed in her veins seemed to move quietly in the moonlit room. And Scarlett was not surprised to see them, these kinsmen who had taken the worst that fate could send and hammered it into the best.

When she arose at last and saw again the black ruins of Twelve Oaks, her head was raised high and something that was youth and beauty and potential tenderness had gone out of her face forever.

Scarlett, always save something to fear—even as you save something to love.…”

Hunger and hard labor, fear and constant strain, the terrors of war and the terrors of Reconstruction had taken away all warmth and youth and softness. About the core of her being, a shell of hardness had formed and, little by little, layer by layer, the shell had thickened during the endless months.

He knew that she took life as it came, opposed her tough-fibered mind to whatever obstacles there might be, fought on with a determination that would not recognize defeat, and kept on fighting even when she saw defeat was inevitable.

Five years ago, a feeling of security had wrapped them all around so gently they were not even aware of it. In its shelter they had flowered. Now it was gone and with it had gone the old thrill, the old sense of something delightful and exciting just around the corner, the old glamor of their way of living.

The faces she was seeing in the room were not faces; they were masks, excellent masks which would never drop.

“Death and taxes and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them!”

Sometimes she thought that all the people she had ever known were strangers except Rhett.

Really, Scarlett, I can’t go all my life, waiting to catch you between husbands.”

she was permitting herself the luxury she had often dreamed—of doing exactly what she pleased and telling people who didn’t like it to go to hell.

Where did she want to get? That was a silly question. Money and security, of course. And yet— Her mind fumbled. She had money and as much security as one could hope for in an insecure world. But, now that she thought about it, they weren’t quite enough. Now that she thought about it, they hadn’t made her particularly happy, though they had made her less harried, less fearful of the morrow.

No one could go forward with a load of aching memories.

“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.”

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

“My dear, I don’t give a damn.”