Gone with the Wind

by Margaret Mitchell

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.

‘Don’t holler—smile and bide your time.’

We bow to the inevitable. We’re not wheat, we’re buckwheat! When a storm comes along it flattens ripe wheat because it’s dry and can’t bend with the wind. But ripe buckwheat’s got sap in it and it bends. And when the wind has passed, it springs up almost as straight and strong as before.

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

“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—” “Please—” “I said your stupid Ashley. Gentlemen all—what do they know about women? What did they know about you? I know you.”

She would faint if he did not stop. If he would only stop—if he would never stop.

“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.”

since the day she had lain sick and desolate in the garden at Twelve Oaks and said: “I won’t look back,” she had set her face against the past.

“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.”

There’s too much honor in her to conceive of dishonor in anyone she loves.

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

Oh, to be with her own kind of people again, those people who had been through the same things and knew how they hurt—and yet how great a part of you they were!

“She is the only dream I ever had that lived and breathed and did not die in the face of reality.”

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

“My darling, you’re such a child. You think that by saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ all the errors and hurts of years past can be remedied, obliterated from the mind, all the poison drawn from old wounds…. Take my handkerchief, Scarlett. Never, at any crisis of your life, have I known you to have a handkerchief.”

“but I love you!” “That’s your misfortune.”

I wish I could care what you do or where you go, but I can’t.” He drew a short breath and said lightly but softly: “My dear, I don’t give a damn.”

With the spirit of her people who would not know defeat, even when it stared them in the face, she raised her chin. She could get Rhett back. She knew she could. There had never been a man she couldn’t get, once she set her mind upon him. “I’ll think of it all 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.”