Top 350 Margaret Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “With the spirit of her people those 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 strand it then. Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.”

— Margaret Mitchell

252. “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

253. “I won’t think of it now. I can’t stand it if I do. I’ll think of it tomorrow at Tara. Tomorrow’s another day.”

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

255. “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

256. “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. He was still a young girl’s dream of the Perfect Knight and her dream asked no more than acknowledgment of his love, went no further than hopes of a kiss.”

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

258. “Well, yes. You see, I’ve invested a good deal of money in you, and I’d hate to lose it.”

— Margaret Mitchell

259. “Ashley to marry Melanie Hamilton! Oh, it couldn’t be true!”

— Margaret Mitchell

260. “My pet, I’ve been to the devil and he’s a very dull fellow.”

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

262. “She heard the soft muffled sound of his footsteps dying away down the long hall, and the complete enormity of her actions came over her. She had lost him forever. Now he would hate her and every time he looked at her he would remember how she threw herself at him when he had given her no encouragement at all.”

— Margaret Mitchell

263. “Don’t spoil it,” he said quietly. “Turn me loose, you fool! Turn me loose! It’s Ashley!” He did not relax his grip. “After all, he’s her husband, ain’t he?” Will asked calmly and, looking down at him in a confusion of joy and impotent fury, Scarlett saw in the quiet depths of his eyes understanding and pity.”

— Margaret Mitchell

264. “How wonderful it would be never to marry but to go on being lovely in pale green dresses and forever courted by handsome men.”

— Margaret Mitchell

265. “Do you really mean they like it? You wouldn’t fox an old friend, would you?′ – in response to Lois Cole’s telegram announcing that Macmillan liked the book that would become known as Gone With the Wind.”

— Margaret Mitchell

266. “But if true love carries any weight with you, you can be certain Miss Suellen will be rich in that if nothing else.”

— Margaret Mitchell

267. “With the introduction of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, Miss Mitchell managed to create the two most famous lovers in the English-speaking world since Romeo and Juliet. Scarlett springs alive in the first sentence of the book and holds the narrative center for over a thousand pages. She is a fabulous, pixilated, one-of-a-kind creation, and she does not utter a dull line in the entire book.”

— Margaret Mitchell

268. “If you say ‘war’ just once more, I’ll go in the house and shut the door. I’ve never gotten so tired of any one word in my life as ‘war,’ unless it’s ’secession.”

— Margaret Mitchell

269. “She belonged to Ashley, forever and ever.”

— Margaret Mitchell

270. “For Ashley was born of a line of men who used their leisure for thinking, not for doing, for spinning brightly colored dreams that had in them no touch of reality. He moved in an inner world that was more beautiful than Georgia and came back to reality with reluctance!”

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

272. “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.”

— Margaret Mitchell

273. “I think – I think,” she began hesitantly, “that I’ve always been lonely where women were concerned. It isn’t just my working that makes Atlanta ladies dislike me. They just don’t like me anyway. No woman ever really liked me, except Mother. Even my sisters. I don’t know why, but even before the war, even before I married Charlie, ladies didn’t seem to approve of anything I did –.”

— Margaret Mitchell

274. “There’s nothing worse than a barbecue turned into an indoor picnic.”

— Margaret Mitchell

275. “Be a little man, Wade, and stop crying or I will come over there and slap you.”

— Margaret Mitchell

276. “All had suffered crushing misfortunes and had not been crushed. They had not been broken by the crash of empires, the machetes of revolting slaves, war, rebellion, proscription, confiscation. Malign fate had broken their necks, perhaps, but never their hearts. They had not whined, they had.”

— Margaret Mitchell

277. “Una famiglia deve, per poter sopravvivere, presentare al mondo un fronte compatto.”

— Margaret Mitchell

278. “As to why I have made no further advances,’ he pursued blandly, as though she had not signified that the conversation was at an end, ‘I am waiting for you to grow up a little more. You see, it wouldn’t be much fun for me to kiss you now and I’m quite selfish about my pleasures. I never fancied kissing children.”

— Margaret Mitchell

279. “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 become what Grandma Fontaine had counseled against, a woman who had seen the worst and so had nothing else to fear. Not life nor Mother nor loss of love nor public opinion. Only hunger and her nightmare dream of hunger could make her afraid.”

— Margaret Mitchell

280. “Home was five blocks away. She would not wait for the sobbing Peter to harness the buggy, would not wait for Dr. Meade to drive her home. She could not endure the tears of the one, the silent condemnation of the other. She went swiftly down the dark front steps without her coat or bonnet and into the misty night. She rounded the corner and started up the long hill toward Peachtree Street, walking in a still wet world, and even her footsteps were as noiseless as a dream.”

— Margaret Mitchell

281. “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. To her had come that pleasant intoxication peculiar to those whose lives are a deliberate slap in the fact of organized society-the gambler, the confidence man, the polite adventuress, all those who succeed by their wits.”

— Margaret Mitchell

282. “I feel sorry for her, but I don’t like people I’ve got to feel sorry for.”

— Margaret Mitchell

283. “These women, so swift to kindness, so tender to the sorrowing, so untiring in times of stress, could be as implacable as furies to any renegade who broke one small law of their unwritten code. This code was simple. Reverence for the Confederacy, honor to the veterans, loyalty to old forms, pride in poverty, open hands to friends and undying hatred to Yankees. Between them, Scarlett and Rhett had outraged every tenet of this code.”

— Margaret Mitchell

284. “Arrogance and callousness for the conquerors, bitter endurance and hatred for the conquered.”

— Margaret Mitchell

285. “I want my girl to be happy and you wouldn’t be happy with him.” “Oh, I would! I would!” “That you would not, daughter. Only when like marries like can there be any happiness.”

— Margaret Mitchell

286. “I wouldn’t have grudged him your body. I know how little bodies mean – especially women’s bodies.”

— Margaret Mitchell

287. “She listened with flesh crawling as Melanie told tales of Tara, making Scarlett a heroine as she faced the invaders and saved Charles’ sword, bragging how Scarlett had put out the fire. Scarlett took no pleasure or pride in the memory of these things. She did not want to think of them at all.”

— Margaret Mitchell

288. “Life was going past her, down a hot shady summer road, life with gray uniforms and jingling spurs and flowered organdie dresses and banjos playing.”

— Margaret Mitchell

289. “Bright lights and wine, fiddles and dancing, brocade and broadcloth in the showy big houses and, just around the corners, slow starvation and cold. Arrogance and callousness for the conquerors, bitter endurance and hatred for the conquered.”

— Margaret Mitchell

290. “You must not say these things, Scarlett! You mustn’t. You don’t mean them. You’ll hate yourself for saying them, and you’ll hate me for hearing them!”

— Margaret Mitchell

291. “Oh, Pa,” cried Scarlett impatiently, “if I married him, I’d change all that!” “Oh, you would, would you now?” said Gerald testily, shooting a sharp look at her. “Then it’s little enough you are knowing of any man living, let alone Ashley. No wife has ever changed a husband one whit, and don’t you be forgetting that.”

— Margaret Mitchell

292. “Food! Food! Why did the stomach have a longer memory than the mind? Scarlett could banish heartbreak but not hunger and each morning as she lay half asleep, before memory brought back to her mind war and hunger, she curled drowsily expecting the sweet smells of bacon frying and rolls baking. And each morning she sniffed so hard to really smell the food she woke herself up.”

— Margaret Mitchell

293. “Somehow she found that she was sitting on the low velvet chair and Ashley, on the hassock at her feet, was holding both her hands in his, in a hard grip. He was saying things – things that made no sense. Her mind was quite blank, quite empty of all the thoughts that had surged through it only a moment before, and his words made no more impression than rain on glass. They fell on unhearing ears, words that were swift and tender and full of pity, like a father speaking to a hurt child.”

— Margaret Mitchell

294. “She was constitutionally unable to endure any man being in love with any woman not herself...”

— Margaret Mitchell

295. “With a heart that was heavy and a little bitter, she said: “You’ve been such a fool, Ashley. Why couldn’t you see that she was worth a million of me?”

— Margaret Mitchell

296. “My news is this,” he answered, grinning down at her. “I still want you more than any woman I’ve ever seen and now that Frank’s gone, I thought you’d be interested to know it.”

— Margaret Mitchell

297. “There was a look of consternation in them, of incredulity and something more – what was it? Yes, Gerald had looked that way the day his pet hunter had broken his leg and he had had to shoot him. Why did she have to think of that now? Such a silly thought. And why did Ashley look so oddly and say nothing?”

— Margaret Mitchell

298. “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.”

— Margaret Mitchell

299. “Don’t spoil it,” he said quietly.”

— Margaret Mitchell

300. “Why, she had never had to do a thing for herself in all her life. There had always been someone to do things for her, to look after her, shelter and protect her and spoil her. It was incredible that she could be in such a fix. Not a friend, not a neighbor to help her. There had always been friends, neighbors, the competent hands of willing slaves. And now in this hour of greatest need, there was no one. It was incredible that she could be so completely alone, and frightened, and far from home.”

— Margaret Mitchell