Top 350 Margaret Mitchell Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Dearest one, do you remember When we last did meet?”

— Margaret Mitchell

102. “It’s hard to salvage jettisoned cargo and, if it is retrieved, it’s usually irreparably damaged. And I fear that when you can afford to fish up the honor and virtue and kindness you’ve thrown overboard, you’ll find they have suffered a sea change and not, I fear, into something rich and strange.”

— Margaret Mitchell

103. “Oh, Scarlett, you are so young you wring my heart.”

— Margaret Mitchell

104. “Suddenly she hated them all because they were different from her, because they carried their losses with an air that she could never attain, would never wish to attain. She hated them, these smiling, light-footed strangers, these proud fools who took pride in something they had lost, seeming to be proud that they had lost it.”

— Margaret Mitchell

105. “He was so tender, so infinitely soothing, she longed to stay in his arms forever. With such strong arms about her, surely nothing could harm her.”

— Margaret Mitchell

106. “If for no other reason she hated the Yankees because they kept her from having real coffee with sugar and thick cream in it.”

— Margaret Mitchell

107. “It was unreal, grotesquely unreal, that morning skies which dawned so tenderly blue could be profaned with cannon smoke that hung over the town like low thunder clouds, that warm noontides filled with the piercing sweetness of massed honeysuckle and climbing roses could be so fearful, as shells screamed into the streets, bursting like the crack of doom, throwing iron splinters hundreds of yards, blowing people and animals to bits.”

— Margaret Mitchell

108. “You’re a heartless creature but that’s part of your charm. Though you’ve got more charm than the law allows.”

— Margaret Mitchell

109. “Influence is everything, and guilt or innocence merely an academic question.”

— Margaret Mitchell

110. “A pain slashed through her heart as savagely as a wild animal’s fangs.”

— Margaret Mitchell

111. “So you could not love me? That is as I hoped. For while I like you immensely, I do not love you and it would be tragic indeed for you to suffer twice from unrequited love, wouldn’t it, dear?”

— Margaret Mitchell

112. “Scarlett O’Hara wasn’t pretty.”

— Margaret Mitchell

113. “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.”

— Margaret Mitchell

114. “Well fiddle dee dee!”

— Margaret Mitchell

115. “It was not the lifting up of her heart to God that brought this balm, for religion went no more than lip deep with her. It was the sight of her mother’s serene face upturned to the throne of God and His saints and angels, praying for blessings on those whom she loved. When Ellen intervened with Heaven, Scarlett felt certain that Heaven heard. Ellen.”

— Margaret Mitchell

116. “She only did – did what she felt she had to do. And our men did what they felt they had to do. People must do what they must do. We don’t all think alike or act alike and it’s wrong to – to judge others by ourselves.”

— Margaret Mitchell

117. “Twill come to you, this love of land.”

— Margaret Mitchell

118. “I always intended having you, Scarlett, since that first day I saw you at Twelve Oaks when you threw that vase and swore and proved that you weren’t a lady. I.”

— Margaret Mitchell

119. “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

120. “She thinks I’m a hussy,′ thought Scarlett. ‘And perhaps she’s right at that!”

— Margaret Mitchell

121. “Then you’ve made the only choice. But there’s a penalty attached, as there is to most things you want. It’s loneliness.”

— Margaret Mitchell

122. “You’re a pretty person, Scarlett,” he said. “Especially when you are meditating devilment.”

— Margaret Mitchell

123. “Oh, I don’t care! I don’t care what they say!” she whispered, as a sweet madness swept over her.”

— Margaret Mitchell

124. “War and marriage and childbirth had passed over her without touching any deep chord within her and she was unchanged.”

— Margaret Mitchell

125. “So I think I’ll remove him from your mind forever, this way. I’ll put my hands, so, on each side of your head and I’ll smash your skull between them like a walnut and that will blot him out.”

— Margaret Mitchell

126. “It’s a poor person and a poor nation that sits down and cries because life isn’t precisely what they expected it to be.”

— Margaret Mitchell

127. “Oh, it wasn’t fair that she should have a dead husband and a baby yelling in the next room and be out of everything that was pleasant.”

— Margaret Mitchell

128. “He could no more resist pricking the conceits, the hypocrisies and the flamboyant patriotism of those about him than a small boy can resist putting a pin into a balloon. He neatly deflated the pompous and exposed the ignorant and the bigoted, and he did it in such subtle ways, drawing his victims out by his seemingly courteous interest, that they never were quite certain what had happened until they stood exposed as windy, high flown and slightly ridiculous.”

— Margaret Mitchell

129. “Melly is the only woman friend I ever had,” she thought forlornly, “the only woman except Mother who really loved me. She’s like Mother, too. Everyone who knew her has clung to her skirts.”

— Margaret Mitchell

130. “Why be an ostrich?”

— Margaret Mitchell

131. “Eavesdroppers often hear highly entertaining and instructive things.”

— Margaret Mitchell

132. “He doesn’t want your mind, the fool, and I don’t want your body. I can buy women cheap. But I do want your mind and your heart, and I’ll never have them, any more than you’ll ever have Ashley’s mind. And that’s why I’m sorry for you.”

— Margaret Mitchell

133. “Well, none of us, as far as I can see, are doing what we intended to do right now, but I think we’ll make out just the same. It’s a poor person and a poor nation that sits down and cries because life isn’t precisely what they expected it to be.”

— Margaret Mitchell

134. “It was as if the whole world were enveloped in an unmoving blanket of grey smoke. And the whole world was still.”

— Margaret Mitchell

135. “She was less frightened also because life had taken on the quality of a dream, a dream too terrible to be real. It wasn’t possible that she, Scarlett O’Hara, should be in such a predicament, with the danger of death about her every hour, every minute. It wasn’t possible that the quiet tenor of life could have changed so completely in so short a time.”

— Margaret Mitchell

136. “Would it please you if I said your eyes were twin goldfish bowls filled to the brim with the clearest green water and that when the fish swim to the top, as they are doing now, you are devilishly charming?”

— Margaret Mitchell

137. “Suddenly she was standing at Tara again with the world about her ears, desolate with the knowledge that she could not face life without the terrible strength of the weak, the gentle, the tender-hearted.”

— Margaret Mitchell

138. “As though she thought I was to blame for what happened,” Scarlett thought indignantly.”

— Margaret Mitchell

139. “Sometimes she thought that all the people she had ever known were strangers except Rhett. “Can’t.”

— Margaret Mitchell

140. “Peace had failed her and Ashley had failed her, both in the same day, and it was as if the last crevice in the shell had been sealed, the final layer hardened. She had.”

— Margaret Mitchell

141. “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?”

— Margaret Mitchell

142. “Better to be tormented with memories of Ashley than Charleston accents.”

— Margaret Mitchell

143. “He thinks the war is all wrong but he’s willing to fight and die anyway, and that takes lots more courage than fighting for something you think is right.”

— Margaret Mitchell

144. “Yes, life has a glitter now-of a sort. That’s what’s wrong with it. The old days had no glitter but they had a charm, a beauty, a slow-paced glamour.”

— Margaret Mitchell

145. “Ashley was imprisoned forever by words which were stronger than any jail.”

— Margaret Mitchell

146. “She had the temper of a Tartar and the rages of a wild cat and, at such times, she did not seem to care what she said or how much it hurt.”

— Margaret Mitchell

147. “She knew she had changed too, but not as they had changed, and it puzzled her. She sat and watched them and she felt herself an alien among them, as alien and lonely as if she had come from another world, speaking a language they did not understand and she not understanding theirs.”

— Margaret Mitchell

148. “She raised her chin and her pale, black-fringed eyes sparkled in the moonlight. Ellen had never told her that desire and attainment were two different matters; life had not taught her that the race was not to the swift. 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.”

— Margaret Mitchell

149. “You have all the passion for life I lack.”

— Margaret Mitchell

150. “I’ve felt that I was trying to row a heavily loaded boat in a storm. I’ve had so much trouble just trying to keep afloat that I couldn’t be bothered about things that didn’t matter, things I could part with easily and not miss, like good manners and – well, things like that. I’ve been too afraid my boat would be swamped and so I’ve dumped overboard the things that seemed least important.”

— Margaret Mitchell