Top 170 Quotes & Sayings by Margaret Mitchell

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Margaret Mitchell.

Last updated on November 22, 2024.

Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an American novelist and journalist. Mitchell wrote only one novel, published during her lifetime, the American Civil War-era novel Gone with the Wind, for which she won the National Book Award for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. Long after her death, a collection of Mitchell's girlhood writings and a novella she wrote as a teenager, titled Lost Laysen, were published. A collection of newspaper articles written by Mitchell for The Atlanta Journal was republished in book form.

American - Novelist | November 8, 1900 - August 16, 1949

Source: Wikipedia

Fighting is like champagne. It goes to the heads of cowards as quickly as of heroes. Any fool can be brave on a battlefield when it's be brave or else be killed.

Margaret Mitchell

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.

Margaret Mitchell

There ain't nothing from the outside that can lick any of us.

Margaret Mitchell

With enough courage, you can do without a reputation.

Margaret Mitchell

Southerners can never resist a losing cause.

Margaret Mitchell

My dear, I don't give a damn.

Margaret Mitchell

After all, tomorrow is another day.

Margaret Mitchell

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

Margaret Mitchell

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.

Margaret Mitchell

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

Margaret Mitchell

Until you have lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.

Margaret Mitchell

Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything, for 'Tis the only thing in this world that lasts, 'Tis the only thing worth working for, worth fighting for - worth dying for.

Margaret Mitchell

The south produced statesmen and soldiers, planters and doctors and lawyers and poets, but certainly no engineers and mechanics. Let Yankees adopt such low callings.

Margaret Mitchell

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

Margaret Mitchell

I can't make you understand because you don't know the meaning of fear. You have the heart of a lion and an utter lack of imagination and I envy you both of those qualities. You'll never mind facing realities and you'll never want to escape from them as I do.

Margaret Mitchell

Hardships make or break people.

Margaret Mitchell

Now you are beginning to think for yourself instead of letting others think for you. That’s the beginning of wisdom.

Margaret Mitchell

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.

Margaret Mitchell

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

Margaret Mitchell

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.

Margaret Mitchell

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.

Margaret Mitchell

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

Margaret Mitchell

I was right when I said I'd never look back. It hurts too much, it drags at your heart till you can't ever do anything else except look back.

Margaret Mitchell

Once, when she was six years old, she had fallen from a tree, flat on her stomach. She could still recall that sickening interval before breath came back into her body. Now, as she looked at him, she felt the same way she had felt then, breathless, stunned, nauseated.

Margaret Mitchell

How closely women clutch the very chains that bind them!

Margaret Mitchell

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.

Margaret Mitchell

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

Margaret Mitchell

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?

Margaret Mitchell

All wars are sacred to those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn't make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight?

Margaret Mitchell

If! If! If! There were so many ifs in life, never any sense of security, always the dread of losing everything.

Margaret Mitchell

Hush," he said. "I am asking you to marry me. Would you be convinced if I knelt down?

Margaret Mitchell

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

Margaret Mitchell

I can't think about that right now. If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow.

Margaret Mitchell

The liar was the hottest to defend his veracity, the coward his courage, the ill-bred his gentlemanliness, and the cad his honor

Margaret Mitchell

The usual masculine dissillusionment is discovering that a woman has a brain

Margaret Mitchell

Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was.

Margaret Mitchell

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.

Margaret Mitchell

The way to get a man interested and to hold his interest was to talk about himself, and then gradually lead the conversation around yourself—and keep it there.

Margaret Mitchell

No matter what rallying cries the orators give to the idiots who fight, no matter what noble purposes they assign to wars, there is never but one reason for a war. And that is money. All wars are in reality money squabbles.

Margaret Mitchell

It is axiomatic among writers that no one ever sues the writer of an unsuccessful book. Just let a book go over twenty-five thousand copies and it is surprising how many people's feelings are hurt, how many screwballs think their brain children have been stolen, and how many people feel that they have been portrayed in a manner calculated to bring infamy upon them.

Margaret Mitchell

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

Margaret Mitchell

There'll always be wars because men love wars. Women don't, but men do.

Margaret Mitchell

If I said I was madly in love with you, I'd be lying and what's more, you'd know it.

Margaret Mitchell

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.

Margaret Mitchell

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.

Margaret Mitchell

You're so brutal to those who love you, Scarlett. You take their love and hold it over their heads like a whip.

Margaret Mitchell

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.

Margaret Mitchell

He had never known such gallantry as the gallantry of Scarlett O'Hara going forth to conquer the world in her mother's velvet curtains and the tail feathers of a rooster.

Margaret Mitchell

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

Margaret Mitchell

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'?

Margaret Mitchell

Some mistakes are too much fun to make only once.

Margaret Mitchell

men are so conceited they’ll believe anything that flatters them

Margaret Mitchell

Burdens are for shoulders strong enough to carry them.

Margaret Mitchell

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

Margaret Mitchell

It was better to know the worst than to wonder.

Margaret Mitchell

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.

Margaret Mitchell

The Irish are the damnedest race. They put so much emphasis on so many wrong things.

Margaret Mitchell

Brilliance is one part talent, two parts wisdom and three parts passion.

Margaret Mitchell

In a weak moment, I have written a book.

Margaret Mitchell

I'd cut up my heart for you to wear if you wanted it.

Margaret Mitchell