Top 350 Margaret Mitchell Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

303. “This,” said a voice from the depths of the sofa, “is too much.”

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

305. “I should love you, for you are charming and talented at many useless accomplishments. But many ladies have charm and accomplishments and are just as useless as you are. No, I don’t love you. But I do like you tremendously – for the elasticity of your conscience, for the selfishness which you seldom trouble to hide, and for the shrewd practicality in you which, I fear, you get from some not too remote Irish-peasant ancestor.”

— Margaret Mitchell

306. “Just think, Scarlett, a half-million dollars, if you’d only restrained your fiery nature and not rushed into wedlock again!”

— Margaret Mitchell

307. “Archie’s carrying him to the vacant lot near Belle’s. He’s dead. Shot through the head.”

— Margaret Mitchell

308. “A hard little pain had started in her heart and was traveling slowly up toward her throat where it would become a lump and the lump would soon become tears.”

— Margaret Mitchell

309. “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

310. “Then why is your mouth all pursed up in that ridiculous way?”

— Margaret Mitchell

311. “You know she said I was going to marry a gentleman with jet-black hair and a long black mustache, and I don’t like black-haired gentlemen.”

— Margaret Mitchell

312. “I think we agreed on the occasion of our first meeting that you were no lady at all.”

— Margaret Mitchell

313. “She married Frank Kennedy two weeks later after a whirlwind courtship which she blushingly told him left her too breathless to oppose his ardor any longer.”

— Margaret Mitchell

314. “And you old enough to be her father!”

— Margaret Mitchell

315. “They both see the truth of this war, but Ashley is willing to die about it and Rhett isn’t. I think that shows Rhett’s good sense. She paused a moment, horror struck that she could have such a thought about Ashley. They both see the same unpleasant truth, but Rhett likes to look it in the face and enrage people by talking about it-and Ashley can hardly bear to face it.”

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

317. “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

318. “She was a woman now and youth was gone.”

— Margaret Mitchell

319. “She thought: “They both see the truth of this war, but Ashley is willing to die about it and Rhett isn’t. I think that shows Rhett’s good sense.”

— Margaret Mitchell

320. “Right here,” answered Rhett and, picking the child up, drew him to his knee. “You are boy enough for me, son.”

— Margaret Mitchell

321. “But she felt that if Ashley succumbed to premeditated feminine tricks, she could never respect him as she now did. Any man who was fool enough to fall for a simper, a faint and an ‘oh, how wonderful you are!’ wasn’t worth having.”

— Margaret Mitchell

322. “If the people who started wars didn’t make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight?”

— Margaret Mitchell

323. “Scarlett had thrown herself on the bed and was sobbing at the top of her voice, sobbing for her lost youth and the pleasures of youth that were denied her, sobbing with the indignation and despair of a child who once could get anything she wanted by sobbing and now knows that sobbing can no longer help her. She burrowed her head in the pillow and cried and kicked with her feet at the tufted counterpane.”

— Margaret Mitchell

324. “The way to get a man interested and to hold his interest was to talk about him, and then gradually lead the conversation around to yourself-and keep it there. Scarlett would have felt some cause for alarm if Melanie had been saying: “How wonderful you are!!” or “How do you ever think of such things? My little ole brain would bust if I even tried to think about them!” But here she was, with a man at her feet, talking as seriously as if she were in church.”

— Margaret Mitchell

325. “Afternoon naps were a custom of the country and never were they so necessary as on the all-day parties, beginning early in the morning and culminating in a ball.”

— Margaret Mitchell

326. “You want me to say it? All right, I’ll say it. I love you.” He.”

— Margaret Mitchell

327. “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

328. “Indeed!” he said coolly. “Well, who’s the happy father? Ashley?”

— Margaret Mitchell

329. “Then – then you mean I’ve ruined it all – that you don’t love me any more?” “That’s right.”

— Margaret Mitchell

330. “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

331. “When such thoughts came she did not pray hastily to God, telling Him she did not mean it. God did not frighten her any more.”

— Margaret Mitchell

332. “Pretty young Mrs. Hamilton, with her dimple and her jingling earbobs and her helpless little ways, blowing a man’s face to a pulp and then burying him in a hastily scratched-out hole!”

— Margaret Mitchell

333. “Then above the confused sounds Stuart Tarleton’s voice rose, in an exultant shout, ‘Yee-aay-ee!’ as if he were on the hunting field. And she heard for the first time, without knowing it, the Rebel yell.”

— Margaret Mitchell

334. “We should have paid heed to cynics like Butler who knew, instead of statesmen who felt – and talked.”

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

336. “I’ve never bothered about what people said.”

— Margaret Mitchell

337. “Marriage was bad enough, but to be widowed-oh, then life was over forever!”

— Margaret Mitchell

338. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

341. “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

342. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

344. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

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

— Margaret Mitchell

347. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell

349. “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

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

— Margaret Mitchell