Top 350 Margaret Mitchell Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “These three ladies disliked and distrusted one another as heartily as the First Triumvirate of Rome, and their close alliance was probably for the same reason.”

— Margaret Mitchell

202. “You’ve been brave so long Scarlett. You just gotta go on being brave.”

— Margaret Mitchell

203. “If God had seen fit to punish them so, then God could very well do without prayers. Religion had always been a bargaining process with Scarlett. She promised God good behavior in exchange for favors. God had broken the bargain time and again, to her way of thinking, and she felt she owned Him nothing now.”

— Margaret Mitchell

204. “I want you more than I have ever wanted any woman – and I’ve waited longer for you than I’ve ever waited for any woman.”

— Margaret Mitchell

205. “You look like you’d swallowed a ramrod and it isn’t becoming”-Rhett Butler.”

— Margaret Mitchell

206. “He looked on people, and he neither liked nor disliked them. He looked on life and was neither heartened nor saddened. He accepted the universe and his place in it for what they were and, shrugging, turned to his music and books and his better world.”

— Margaret Mitchell

207. “Oh, Rhett, why do there have to be wars? It would have been so much better for the Yankees to pay for the darkies – or even for us to give them the darkies free of charge than to have this happen.” “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.”

— Margaret Mitchell

208. “So you’ll have to wait for approval from your grandchildren.” “I wonder what our grandchildren will be like!” “Are you suggesting by that ‘our’ that you and I will have mutual grandchildren? Fie, Mrs. Kennedy!”

— Margaret Mitchell

209. “He said nothing in the world was worth what this war was going to do to us. He said there wasn’t anything at all to glory – it was just misery and dirt.”

— Margaret Mitchell

210. “Drink and dissipation had done their work on the coin-clean profile and now it was no longer the head of a young pagan prince on new-minted gold but a decadent, tired Caesar on copper debased by long usage.”

— Margaret Mitchell

211. “A new baby! Why, Scarlett, this is a surprise!” he laughed, leaning down to push the blanket away from Ella Lorena’s small ugly face.” – Rhett Butler.”

— Margaret Mitchell

212. “She had never understood either of the men she had loved and so she had lost them both. Now, she had a fumbling knowledge that, had she ever understood Ashley, she would never have loved him; had she ever understood Rhett, she would never have lost him.”

— Margaret Mitchell

213. “Ashley watched her go and saw her square her small shoulders as she went. And that gesture went to his heart, more than any words she had spoken.”

— Margaret Mitchell

214. “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: ‘There’s 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

215. “Then he had thought it all beyond her mental grasp and it had been pleasant to explain things to her. Now he saw that she understood entirely too well and he felt the usual masculine indignation at the duplicity of women. Added to it was the usual masculine disillusionment in discovering that a woman has a brain.”

— Margaret Mitchell

216. “Oh, what a mess life was! Why had she been such an idiot as to marry Charles of all people and have her life end at sixteen?”

— Margaret Mitchell

217. “Mitchell rose to the task of playing the avenging angel for the Confederate States. There have been hundreds of novels about the Civil War, but Gone With the Wind stands like an obelisk in the.”

— Margaret Mitchell

218. “Fo’ Gawd, Miss Scarlett! We’s got ter have a doctah. Ah- Ah- Miss Scarlett, Ah doan know nuthin’ ‘bout bringin’ babies. -Prissy.”

— Margaret Mitchell

219. “Talking to Rhett was comparable only to one thing, the feeling of ease and comfort afforded by a pair of old slippers after dancing in a pair too tight.”

— Margaret Mitchell

220. “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.”

— Margaret Mitchell

221. “Hush,” he said. “I am asking you to marry me. Would you be convinced if I knelt down?”

— Margaret Mitchell

222. “Why does a girl have to be so silly to catch a husband?”

— Margaret Mitchell

223. “It’s only hypocrites like you, my dear lady, just as black at heart but trying to hide it, who become enraged when called by their right names.”

— Margaret Mitchell

224. “I’ve got something that most pretty ladies haven’t got – and that’s a mind that’s made up.”

— Margaret Mitchell

225. “Georgia, a lack of the niceties of classical education carried no shame, provided a man was smart in the things that mattered. And raising good cotton, riding well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring the ladies with elegance and carrying one’s liquor like a gentleman were the things that mattered.”

— Margaret Mitchell

226. “Well, she was right, as far as she knew. But, Scarlett, did it ever occur to you that even the most deathless love could wear out?”

— Margaret Mitchell

227. “He had never once crossed the borders of friendliness with her and, when she thought of this, fresh anger rose, the anger of hurt pride and feminine vanity.”

— Margaret Mitchell

228. “Even if you think such things, why do you say them?” she scolded. “If you’d just think what you please but keep your mouth shut, everything would be so much nicer.”

— Margaret Mitchell

229. “Francamente me ne infischio.”

— Margaret Mitchell

230. “Like must marry like or there’ll be no happiness.”

— Margaret Mitchell

231. “I’m sure your children won’t approve of you, Scarlett, any more than Mrs. Merriwether and Mrs. Elsing and their broods approve of you now. Your children will probably be soft, prissy creatures, as the children of hard-bitten characters usually are. And to make them worse, you, like every other mother, are probably determined that they shall never know the hardships you’ve known. And that’s all wrong. Hardships make or break people. So you’ll have to wait for approval from your grandchildren.”

— Margaret Mitchell

232. “So, from the cradle to the grave, women strove to make men pleased with themselves, and the satisfied men repaid lavishly with gallantry and adoration. In fact, men willingly gave the ladies everything in the world except credit for having intelligence.”

— Margaret Mitchell

233. “All you’ve done is to be different from other women and you’ve made a little success at it. As I’ve told you before, that is the one unforgivable sin in any society. Be different and be damned! Scarlett, the mere fact that you’ve made a success of your mill is an insult to every man who hasn’t succeeded. Remember, a well-bred female’s place is in the home and she should know nothing about this busy, brutal world.”

— Margaret Mitchell

234. “But, for four years, he had seen others who had refused to recognize defeat, men who rode gaily into sure disaster because they were gallant. And they had been defeated, just the same. He thought as he stared at Will in the shadowy hall that 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

235. “She spoke in the soft slurring voice of the coastal Georgian, liquid of vowels, kind to consonants and with the barest trace of French accent. It was a voice never raised in command to a servant or reproof to a child but a voice that was obeyed instantly at Tara, where her husband’s blustering and roaring were quietly disregarded.”

— Margaret Mitchell

236. “God’s nightgown!” said Scarlett to herself in indignation, using Gerald’s favorite oath. “He looks as if – as if he knew what I looked like without my shimmy,” and, tossing her head, she went up the steps. In the.”

— Margaret Mitchell

237. “Come, Scarlett, you are no child, no schoolgirl to put me off with foolish excuses about decency and so forth. 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

238. “I do not want to marry you or anyone else. I am not a marrying man.”

— Margaret Mitchell

239. “There was no one to tell Scarlett that her own personality, frighteningly vital though it was, was more attractive than any masquerade she might adopt. Had she been told, she would have been pleased but unbelieving. And the civilization of which she was a part would have been unbelieving too, for at no time, before or since, had so low a premium been placed on feminine naturalness.”

— Margaret Mitchell

240. “Mrs. Charles Hamilton – one hundred and fifty dollars – in gold.”

— Margaret Mitchell

241. “Las pruebas, la adversidad, forman a la gente o la destrozan.”

— Margaret Mitchell

242. “Ellen was the audience before which the blustering drama of Gerald O’Hara had been played. Now the curtain had been rung down forever, the footlights dimmed and the audience suddenly vanished, while the stunned old actor remained on his empty stage, waiting for his cues.”

— Margaret Mitchell

243. “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 the 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.”

— Margaret Mitchell

244. “She was seeing things with new eyes for, somewhere along the long road to Tara, she had left her girlhood behind her. She was no longer plastic clay, yielding imprint to each new experience. The clay had hardened, some time in this indeterminate day which had lasted a thousand years. Tonight was the last time she would ever be ministered to as a child. She was a woman now and youth was gone.”

— Margaret Mitchell

245. “She thought without surprise, looking down from her height, that her shoulders were strong enough to bear anything now, having borne the worst that could ever happen to her. She could not desert Tara; she belonged to the red acres far more than they could ever belong to her. Her roots went deep into the blood-colored soil and sucked up life, as did the cotton.”

— Margaret Mitchell

246. “The O’Haras were a clannish tribe, clinging to one another in prosperity as well as in adversity, not for any overweening family affection but because they had learned through grim years that to survive a family must present an unbroken front to the world.”

— Margaret Mitchell

247. “It hurts so terribly to cry, but not so much as not being able to cry.”

— Margaret Mitchell

248. “Until you have lost your reputation you never know what a burden it was or what freedom is.”

— Margaret Mitchell

249. “I’m very drunk and I intend on getting still drunker before this evening’s over.”

— Margaret Mitchell

250. “Tara made her charming, but the war made her Scarlett O’Hara.”

— Margaret Mitchell