Quotes from Margaret Mitchell

Times never change when there's a need for honest work to be done.

She wanted to cry but the tears would not come. They seemed to flood her chest, and they were hot tears that burned under her bosom, but they would not flow.

It's hard to salvage jettisoned cargo and, if it is retrieved, it's usually irreparably damaged. And I fear that when you can afford to fish up the honor and virtue and kindness you've thrown overboard, you'll find they have suffered a sea change and not, I fear, into something rich and strange.

Her manners had been imposed upon her by her mother's gentle admonitions and the sterner discipline of her mammy; her eyes were her own.

Scarlett) Go on! Go on now! I want you to hurry. I don't want to ever see you again. I hope a cannon ball lands right on you. I hope it blows you to a million pieces. I-- (Rhett) Never mind the rest. I follow your general idea. When I'm dead on the altar of my country, I hope your conscience hurts you.

You need kissing badly. That's what's wrong with you. All your beaux have respected you too much, though God knows why, or they have been too afraid of you to really do right by you. The result is that you are unendurably uppity. You should be kissed and by someone who knows how.

Oh, Rhett, why do there have to be wars? It would have been so much better for the Yankees to pay for the darkies—or even for us to give them the darkies free of charge than to have this happen." "It isn't the darkies, Scarlett. They're just the excuse. There'll always be wars because men love wars. Women don't, but men do—yea, passing the love of women.

In fact, the mothers of all her girl friends impressed on their daughters the necessity of being helpless, clinging, doe-eyed creatures. Really, it took a lot of sense to cultivate and hold such a pose.

Here, take my handkerchief. Never, at any crisis of your life, have I known you to have a handkerchief.

Melly couldn't say boo to a goose.

Was Tara still standing? Or was Tara also gone with the wind which had swept through Georgia?

Pride & honor & truth & virtue & kindliness, he enumerated silkily. You are right, Scarlett. They aren't important when a boat is sinking. But look around you at your friends. Either they are bringing their boats ashore safely with cargoes intact or they are content to go down with all flags flying.

She had the temper of a Tartar and the rages of a wild cat and, at such times, she did not seem to care what she said or how much it hurt.

Sometimes she thought that all the people she had ever known were strangers except Rhett. "Can't

Ashley was imprisoned forever by words which were stronger than any jail.

He looked on people, and he neither liked nor disliked them. He looked on life and was neither heartened nor saddened. He accepted the universe and his place in it for what they were and, shrugging, turned to his music and books and his better world.

Suddenly she was standing at Tara again with the world about her ears, desolate with the knowledge that she could not face life without the terrible strength of the weak, the gentle, the tender-hearted.

Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.

What is broken is broken—and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.

The husband is always the last to find out.

I want you more than I have ever wanted any woman—and I've waited longer for you than I've ever waited for any woman.

She knew she had changed too, but not as they had changed, and it puzzled her. She sat and watched them and she felt herself an alien among them, as alien and lonely as if she had come from another world, speaking a language they did not understand and she not understanding theirs.

What a white livered, cowardly little bitch you are.

Scarlett permitted the embrace - because in the dark smoke- fill the kitchen, there had been born a greater respect for her sister in law, a closer feeling of comradeship.