Top 350 Margaret Mitchell Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 8

251. “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

252. “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

253. “She was constitutionally unable to endure any man being in love with any woman not herself, and the sight of India Wilkes and Stuart at the speaking had been too much for her predatory nature.”

— Margaret Mitchell

254. “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

255. “It was awful for a man to know what women really thought about and talked about. It made a girl feel positively undressed.”

— Margaret Mitchell

256. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

263. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

266. “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

267. “A gentleman always appeared to believe a lady even when he knew she was lying. That was Southern chivalry. A gentleman always obeyed the rules and said the correct things and made life easier for a lady.”

— Margaret Mitchell

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

276. “What I want I take if I can get it, and so I wrestle neither with angels nor devils.”

— Margaret Mitchell

277. “El mundo puede perdonarlo todo, excepto a la gente que se soluciona sola sus asuntos.”

— Margaret Mitchell

278. “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

279. “For a woman, love comes after marriage.”

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

281. “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

282. “How closely women clutch the very chains that bind them! You think the Hindu custom barbarous – but would you have had the courage to appear here tonight if the Confederacy hadn’t needed you?”

— Margaret Mitchell

283. “Did you ever in your novel reading come across the old situation of the disinterested wife falling in love with her own husband?” “You know I don’t read novels,” she said and, trying to equal his jesting mood, went on: “Besides, you once said it was the height of bad form for husbands and wives to love each other.” “I once said too God damn many things,” he retorted abruptly and rose to his feet.”

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “This is war time. We can’t think of the proprieties now.”

— Margaret Mitchell

292. “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

293. “No one seemed to realize what really possessed her, what drove her like a mad woman. It was a passion to get her affairs in order before she had to retire behind doors, to have as much money as possible in case the deluge broke upon her again, to have a stout levee of cash against the rising tide of Yankee hate. Money was the obsession dominating her mind these days. When she thought of the baby at all, it was with baffled rage at the untimeliness of it.”

— Margaret Mitchell

294. “His one great flaw was making the terrible and exhilarating mistake of falling in love with Scarlett O’Hara.”

— Margaret Mitchell

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

299. “After all, they were Yankees and no one expected anything better from Yankees. So their unthinking insults to her state, her people and their morals, glanced off and never struck deep enough to cause her more than a well-concealed sneer until an incident occurred which made her sick with rage and showed her, if she needed any showing, how wide was the gap between North and South and how utterly impossible it was to bridge it.”

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell