Top 350 Margaret Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “I’m very drunk and I intend on getting still drunker before this evening’s over.”

— Margaret Mitchell

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

260. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

262. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

264. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

282. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

289. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

291. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

293. “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

294. “As usual in the very young, she marveled that people could be so selfishly oblivious to her pain and the world rock along just the same, in spite of her heartbreak.”

— Margaret Mitchell

295. “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

296. “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

297. “You’ve been with me for months,” thought Scarlett grimly, looking at her sister-in-law, “and it’s never occurred to you that it’s charity you’re living on. And I guess it never will. You’re one of those people the war didn’t change and you go right on thinking and acting just like nothing had happened – like we were still rich as Croesus and had more food than we knew what to do with and guests didn’t matter. I guess I’ve got you on my neck for the rest of my life. But I won’t have Cathleen too.”

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

299. “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

300. “You should have insured a place for your children in the social scheme years ago – but you didn’t. You didn’t even bother to keep what position you had. And it’s too much to hope that you’ll mend your ways at this late date. You’re too anxious to make money and too fond of bullying people.”

— Margaret Mitchell