Margaret Mitchell Quotes

You are a child if you thought I didn’t know, for all your smothering yourself under that hot lap robe. Of course, I knew. Why else do you think I’ve been—” He stopped suddenly and a silence fell between them. He picked up the reins and clucked to the horse.

I've always had a weakness for lost causes once they're really lost.

I'm tired of saying "How wonderful you are!" to fool men, who haven't got one half sense I've got.

No, my dear, I'm not in love with you, no more than you are with me, and if I were, you would be the last person I'd ever tell. God help the man who ever really loves you. You'd break his heart, my darling, cruel, destructive little cat who is so careless and confident she doesn't even trouble to sheathe her claws.

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

Everywhere, women gathered in knots, huddled in groups on front porches, on sidewalks, even in the middle of the streets, telling each other that no news is good news, trying to comfort each other, trying to present a brave appearance.

I've found out that money is the most important thing in the world and, as God is my witness, I don't ever intend to be without it again. I'll never be hungry again.

She could not ignore life. She had to live it and it was too brutal, too hostile, for her even to try to gloss over its harshness with a smile

My age is my own private business and I intend to keep it so - if I can. I am not so old that I am ashamed of my age and I am not so young that I couldn't have written my book and that is all the public needs to know about my age.

What most people don't seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one.

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.

Ser eyes met his, hers naked with pleading, his remote as mountain lakes under gray skies. She saw in them defeat of her wild dream, her mad desires.

You have eternity in which to explain and only one night to be a martyr in the amphitheater Get out, darling, and let me see the lions eat you.

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.

I want to make you faint. I will make you faint. You've had this coming to you for years. None of the fools you've known have kissed you like this - have they? Your precious Charles or Frank or your stupid Ashley... I said your stupid Ashley. Gentlemen all - what do they know about women? What do they know about you? I know you.

Scarlett's mind went back through the years to the still hot noon at Tara when grey smoke curled above a blue-clad body and Melanie stood at the top of the stairs with Charles' sabre in her hand. Scarlett remembered that she had thought at the time: 'How silly! Melly couldn't even heft that sword!' But now she knew that had the necessity arisen, Melanie would have charged down those stairs and killed the Yankee - or been killed herself.

The green eyes in the carefully sweet face were turbulent, willful, lusty with life, distinctly at variance with her decorous demeanor. Her manners had been imposed upon her ... her eyes were her own.

Well, my dear, take heart. Some day, I will kiss you and you will like it. But not now, so I beg you not to be too impatient.

I do not write with ease, nor am I ever pleased with anything I write. And so I rewrite.

I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'll never understand or forgive myself. And if a bullet gets me, so help me, I'll laugh at myself for being an idiot. There's one thing I do know... and that is that I love you, Scarlett. In spite of you and me and the whole silly world going to pieces around us, I love you. Because we're alike. Bad lots, both of us. Selfish and shrewd. But able to look things in the eyes as we call them by their right names.

You're like the thief who isn't the least bit sorry he stole, but is terribly, terribly sorry he's going to jail. - Rhett Butler

All you have done is to be different from other women and you have made a little success of it. This is unforgivable sin in any society. The mere fact that you have succeed to run the mill is an insult to everyman who hasn't succeed.

People must do what they must do. We all don't think alike or act alike and it's wrong to-to judge others by ourselves.

Sir,"she said,"you are no gentleman!" An apt observation,"he answered airily."And, you, Miss, are no lady.

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

Say you’ll marry me when I come back or, before God, I won’t go. I’ll stay around here and play a guitar under your window every night and sing at the top of my voice and compromise you, so you’ll have to marry me to save your reputation.

Child, it's a very bad thing for a woman to face the worst that can happen to her, because after she's faced the worst she can't ever really fear anything again. ...Scarlett, always save something to fear - even as you save something to love.

The world can forgive practically anything except people who mind their own business.

What’s 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 live…I’m too old to believe in such sentimentalities as clean slates and starting all over.

How closely women clutch the very chains that bind them!

Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect. We take what we get and are thankful it's no worse than it is.

Every problem has two handles. You can grab it by the handle of fear or the handle of hope.

Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.

But she knew that no matter what beauty lay behind, it must remain there. No one could go forward with a load of aching memories.

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.

That is the one unforgivable sin in any society. Be different and be damned!

Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.

I loved something I made up

There ain't nothin' from the outside can lick any of us.

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.

I want peace. I want to see if somewhere there isn't something left in life of charm and grace.

Now she had a fumbling knowledge that, had she ever understood Ashley, she would never have loved him; had she ever understood Rhett, she would never have lost him.

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

Men and women, they were beautiful and wild, all a little violent under their pleasant ways and only a little tamed.

Oh, why was he so handsomely blond, so courteously aloof, so maddeningly boring with his talk about Europe and books and music and poetry and things that interested her not at all - and yet so desirable?

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'?

And if we folks have a motto, it's this: 'Don't holler - smile and bide your time.' We've survived a passel of things that way, smiling and biding our time, and we've gotten to be experts at surviving.

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