Top 350 Margaret Mitchell Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “There’s nothing worse than a barbecue turned into an indoor picnic.”

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “Melanie had been her sword and her shield, her comfort and her strength.”

— Margaret Mitchell

269. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

275. “Tesoro, il mondo perdona, in fin dei conti, tutto, meno il fatto che la gente si occupi dei fatti propri.”

— Margaret Mitchell

276. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

278. “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

279. “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

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

— 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. “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

283. “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

284. “Well, they get results, don’t they?”

— Margaret Mitchell

285. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

287. “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

288. “She’d make them sorry. She’d show them. She didn’t quite see how she’d show them, but she’d do it all the same. She’d hurt them worse than they hurt her.”

— Margaret Mitchell

289. “Since eight o’clock she had been trying on and rejecting dresses, and now she stood dejected and irritable in lace pantalets, linen corset cover and three billowing lace and linen petticoats. Discarded garments lay about her on the floor, the bed, the chairs, in bright heaps of color and straying ribbons. The rose organdie with long pink sash was becoming, but she had worn it last summer when Melanie visited Twelve Oaks and she’d be sure to remember it. And might be catty enough to mention it.”

— Margaret Mitchell

290. “But Gerald has known poverty, and he could never learn to lose money with good humor or good grace.”

— Margaret Mitchell

291. “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

292. “They were convalescing slowly and lay scrawny and weak in their bed. While they had been unconscious, the world had changed. The Yankees had come, the darkies had gone and Mother had died.”

— Margaret Mitchell

293. “The Cause they had thought could never fall had fallen forever.”

— Margaret Mitchell

294. “She felt little affection for the child, hide the fact though she might.”

— Margaret Mitchell

295. “There was an exciting atmosphere about the place that uplifted her. It was as if she could actually feel the accelerated steady pulse of the town’s heart beating in time with her own.”

— Margaret Mitchell

296. “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

297. “She whispered “Yes” before she even thought.”

— Margaret Mitchell

298. “Ashley wrote me that we should not be fighting the Yankees. And that we have been betrayed into it by statesmen and orators mouthing catchwords and prejudices,” said Melly rapidly. “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

299. “Child, it’s a very bad thing for a woman to face the worst that can happen.”

— Margaret Mitchell

300. “For all his exasperating qualities, she grew to look forward to his calls. There was something exciting about him that she could not analyze, something different from any man she had ever known. There was something breathtaking in the grace of his big body which made his very entrance into a room like an abrupt physical impact, something in the impertinence and bland mockery of his dark eyes that challenged her spirit to subdue him.”

— Margaret Mitchell