And apologies, once postponed, become harder and harder to make, and finally impossible.

Vanity was stronger than love at sixteen and there was no room in her hot heart now for anything but hate.

I bare my soul and you are suspicious! No, Scarlett, this is a bona fide honorable declaration. I admit that it's not in the best of taste, coming at this time, but I have a very good excuse for my lack of breeding. I'm going away tomorrow for a long time and I fear that if I wait till I return you'll have married some one else with a little money. So I thought, why not me and my money? Really, Scarlett, I can't go all my life waiting to catch you between husbands.

His voice stopped and they looked for a long quiet moment into each other's eyes and between them lay the sunny lost youth that they had so unthinkingly shared.

In the end what will happen will be what has happened whenever a civilization breaks up. The people who have brains and courage come through and the ones who haven't are winnowed out.

Death, taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them.

Why will people persist in reading strange meanings into the simplest of story? Is it not enough that a writer can entertain for a few hours with narrative without being suspected of 'significances' or symbolism or 'social trends'?