Explore Quotes by Margaret Mitchell

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.

All she wanted was a breathing space in which to hurt.

The whole world can't lick us but we can lick ourselves by longing too hard for things we haven't got any more - and by remembering too much.

It was this feminine conspiracy which made Southern society so pleasant. Women knew that a land where men were contented, uncontradicted ans safe in possession of unpunctured vanity was likely to be a very pleasant place for women to live. So, from the cradle to the grave, women strove to make men pleased with themselves, and the satisfied men repaid lavishly with gallantry and adoration. In fact, men willingly gave ladies everything in the world except credit for having intelligence.

It doesn’t matter who you marry, as long as he thinks like you and is a gentleman and a Southerner and prideful. For a woman, love comes after marriage.” “Oh, Pa, that’s such an Old Country notion!” “And a good notion it is! All this American business of running around marrying for love, like servants, like Yankees! The best marriages are when the parents choose for the girl. For how can a silly piece like yourself tell a good man from a scoundrel?

you can go to the Devil and not at your leisure. You can go now, for all I care.' 'My pet, I've been to the Devil and he's a very dull fellow. I won't go there again, not even for you.

[T]he merciful adjustment which nature makes when what cannot be cured must be endured.

She is the only dream I ever had that lived and breathed and did not die in the face of reality." (Ashley said about Melanie)

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

But the small cloud which appeared in the northwest four months ago had blown up into a mighty storm and then into a screaming tornado,sweeping away her world, whirling her out of her sheltered life,and dropping her down in the midst of this still,haunted desolation.

Madam, you flatter yourself. I do not want to marry you or anyone else. I am not a marrying man. - Rhett Butler

I won't need you to rescue meM. I can take care of myself, thank you. - Scarlett O'Hara.

God help the man who ever really loves you.

[Yankees] are pretty much like southerners except with worse manners, of course, and terrible accents.

Like most girls, her imagination carried her just as far as the altar and no further.

It had been so long since she had seen him and she had lived on memories until they were worn thin.

Now he saw that she understood entirely too well and he felt the usual masculine indignation at the duplicity of women. Added to it was the usual masculine disillusionment in discovering that a woman has a brain.

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.

All really nice girls wonder when men don't try to kiss them. They know they shouldn't want them to and they know they must act insulted if they do, but just the same, they wish the men would try.

If he's forgotten me, I'll make him remember me. I'll make him want me again.

I can't go all my life waiting to catch you between husbands.