Perhaps - I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears
— Scarlett O’Hara (Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind)
There is nothing left,” she said at last. “Nothing left for me. Nothing to love. Nothing to fight for. You are gone and Tara is going.
— (Scarlett O’Hara)
Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
My home is gone and all the money that I so took for granted I never realized I had it. And I am fitted for nothing in this world, for the world I belonged in has gone.
— (Ashley Wilkes)
Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Something of her exasperated weariness seemed to penetrate his mind, calling it back from its wanderings, for he raised her hands with tenderness and, turning them palm up, looked at the calluses.
“These are the most beautiful hands I know,” he said and kissed each palm lightly. “They are beautiful because they are strong and every callus is a medal, Scarlett, every blister an award for bravery and unselfishness. They’ve been roughened for all of us, your father, the girls, Melanie, the baby, the negroes and for me. My dear, I know what you are thinking. You’re thinking, ‘Here stands an impractical fool talking tommyrot about dead gods when living people are in danger.’ Isn’t that true?”
— (Ashley Wilkes)Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
When she arose at last and saw again the black ruins of Twelve Oaks, her head was raised high and something that was youth and beauty and potential tenderness had gone out of her face forever. What was past was past. Those who were dead were dead. The lazy luxury of the old days was gone, never to return. And, as Scarlett settled the heavy basket across her arm, she had settled her own mind and her own life. There was no going back and she was going forward. Throughout the South for fifty years there would be bitter-eyed women who looked backward, to dead times, to dead men, evoking memories that hurt and were futile, bearing poverty with bitter pride because they had those memories. But Scarlett was never to look back.
— Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Crying was so useless now. The only time crying ever did any good was when there was a man around from whom you wished favored.
— Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Vanity was stronger than love at sixteen and there was no room in her hot heart for anything but hate.
— Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
I wish to Heaven I was married,” she said resentfully as she attacked the yams with loathing. “I’m tired of everlastingly being unnatural and never doing anything I want to do. I’m tired of acting like I don’t eat more than a bird, and walking when I want to run and saying I feel faint after a waltz, when I could dance for two days and never get tired. I’m tired of saying, ‘How wonderful you are!’ to fool men who haven’t got one-half the sense I’ve got, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t know anything, so men can tell me things and feel important while they’re doing it!
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind
She wanted him, in that first instant, wanted him as simply and unreasoningly as she wanted food to eat, horses to ride and a soft bed on which to lay herself.
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind
