If Gone With the Wind has a theme it is that of survival. What makes some people come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong, and brave, go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don't. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those that go under? I only know that survivors used to call that quality 'gumption.' So I wrote about people who had gumption and people who didn't.

I'm tempting you with fine gifts until your girlish ideals are quite worn away and you are at my mercy.

What is there to see in Europe? I'll bet those foreigners can't show us a thing we haven't got right here in Georgia.

I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. 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 South produced statesmen and soldiers, planters and doctors, lawyers and poets, but certainly not engineers or mechanics. Let the Yankees adopt such low callings.

It's not because I've -what is the phrase? -'swept you off your feet' by my -er- ardor?

Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything.