Great Throughts Treasury

"Scarlett permitted the embrace - because in the dark smoke- fill the kitchen, there had been born a greater respect for her sister in law, a closer feeling of comradeship."

"Scarlett, I don't know just when it was that the bleak realization came over me that my own private shadow show was over. Perhaps in the first five minutes at Bull Run when I saw the first man I killed drop to the ground. But I knew it was over and I could no longer be a spectator. No, I suddenly found myself on the curtain, an actor, posturing and making futile gestures. My little inner world was gone, invaded by people whose thoughts were not my thoughts, whose actions were as alien as a Hottentot's. They'd tramped through my world with slimy feet and there was no place left where I could take refuge when things became too bad to stand. When I was in prison, I thought: When the war is over, I can go back to the old life and the old dreams and watch the shadow show again. But, Scarlett, there's no going back. And this which is facing all of us now is worse than war and worse than prison--and, to me, worse than death. . . . So, you see, Scarlett, I'm being punished for being afraid."

"Scarlett, always save something to fear?even as you save something to love."

"Scarlett, I'm a bad influence on you and if you have any sense you will send me packing - if you can. I'm very hard to get rid of. But I'm bad for you."

"SCARLETT: I only know that I love you! RHETT: That's your misfortune."

"Scarlett, when you are forty-five, perhaps you will know what I'm talking about and then perhaps you, too, will be tired of imitation gentry and shoddy manners and cheap emotions. But I doubt it. I think you'll always be more attracted by glister than by gold."

"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"

"She could see so clearly now that he was only a childish fancy, no more important really than her spoiled desire for the aquamarine earbobs she had coaxed out of Gerald. For, once she owned the earbobs, they had lost their value, as everything except money lost its value once it was hers."

"She felt puzzled and ashamed, as always when people attributed to her emotions and motives they possessed and thought she shared."

"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."

"She hasn't your strength. She's never had any strength. She's never had anything but heart."

"She couldn't survey the wreck of the world with an air of casual unconcern."

"She had never understood either of the men she had loved and so she had lost them both. 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."

"She knew only that if she did or said thus-and-so, men would unerringly respond with the complimentary thus-and-so. It was like a mathematical formula and no more difficult, for mathematics was the one subject that had come easy to Scarlett in her schooldays."

"She is the only dream I ever had that lived and breathed and did not die in the face of reality."

"She raised her chin and her pale, black-fringed eyes sparkled in the moonlight. Ellen had never told her that desire and attainment were two different matters; life had not taught her that the race was not to the swift. She lay in the silvery shadows with courage rising and made the plans that a sixteen-year-old makes when life has been so pleasant that defeat is an impossibility and a pretty dress and a clear complexion are weapons to vanquish fate."

"She saw in his eyes defeat of her wild dreams, her mad desires."

"She was a tiny, frailly built girl, who gave the appearance of a child masquerading in her mother?s enormous hoop skirts ? an illusion that was heightened by the shy, almost frightened look in her too large brown eyes. She had a cloud of curly dark hair which was so sternly repressed beneath its net that no vagrant tendrils escaped, and this dark mass, with its long widow?s peak, accentuated the heart shape of her face. Too wide across the cheek bones, too pointed at the chin, it was a sweet, timid face but a plain face, and she had no feminine tricks of allure to make observers forget its plainness. She looked ? and was, as simple as earth, as good as bread, as transparent as spring water."

"She was as forthright and simple as the winds that blew over Tara and the yellow river that wound around it."

"She was constitutionally unable to endure any man being in love with any woman not herself..."

"She wasn't going to sit down and patiently wait for a miracle to help her. She was going to rush into life and wrest from it what she could."

"She was darkness and he was darkness and there had never been anything before this time, only darkness and his lips upon her. She tried to speak and his mouth was over hers again. Suddenly she had a wild thrill such as she had never known; joy, fear, madness, excitement, surrender to arms that were too strong, lips too bruising, fate that moved too fast."

"So you?ll have to wait for approval from your grandchildren. I wonder what our grandchildren will be like! Are you suggesting by that ?our? that you and I will have mutual grandchildren? Fie, Mrs. Kennedy!"

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

"So I have. Let me hold the baby, Scarlett. Oh, I know how to hold babies. I have many strange accomplishments. Well, he certainly looks like Frank. All except the whiskers, but give him time. I hope not. It?s a girl."

"Sir said Mrs. Meade indignantly. There are NO deserters in the Confederate army.I beg your pardon, said Rhett with mock humility. I meant those thousands on furlough who FORGOT to rejoin their regiments and those who have been over their wounds for six months but who remain at home, going about their usual business or doing the spring plowing."

"Somehow the bright beauty had gone from April afternoon and from her heart as well and the sad sweetness of remembering was as bitter as gall."

"Sometimes Frank sighed, thinking he had caught a tropic bird, all flame and jewel color, when a wren would have served him just as well. In fact, much better."

"Southerners can never resist a losing cause."

"Suddenly she felt strong and happy. She was not afraid of the darkness or the fog and she knew with a singing in her heart that she would never fear them again. No matter what mists might curl around her in the future, she knew her refuge. She started briskly up the street toward home and the blocks seemed very long. Far, far too long. She caught up her skirts to her knees and began to run lightly. But this time she was not running from fear. She was running because Rhett's arms were at the end of the street."

"Somewhere, on the long road that wound through those four years, the girl with her sachet and dancing slippers had slipped away and there was left a woman with sharp green eyes, who counted pennies and turned her hands to many menial tasks, a woman to whom nothing was left from the wreckage except the indestructible red earth on which she stood."

"Spring had come early that year, with warm quick rains and sudden frothing of pink peach blossoms and dogwood dappling with white stars the dark river swamp and far-off hills. Already the plowing was nearly finished, and the bloody glory of the sunset colored the fresh-cut furrows of red Georgia clay to even redder hues. The moist hungry earth, waiting upturned for the cotton seeds, showed pinkish on the sandy tops of furrows, vermilion and scarlet and maroon where shadows lay along the sides of the trenches. The whitewashed brick plantation house seemed an island set in a wild red sea, a sea of spiraling, curving, crescent billows petrified suddenly at the moment when the pink-tipped waves were breaking into surf. For here were no long, straight furrows, such as could be seen in the yellow clay fields of the flat middle Georgia country or in the lush black earth of the coastal plantations. The rolling foothill country of north Georgia was plowed in a million curves to keep the rich earth from washing down into the river bottoms. It was a savagely red land, blood-colored after rains, brick dust in droughts, the best cotton land in the world. It was a pleasant land of white houses, peaceful plowed fields and sluggish yellow rivers, but a land of contrasts, of brightest sun glare and densest shade. The plantation clearings and miles of cotton fields smiled up to a warm sun, placid, complacent. At their edges rose the virgin forests, dark and cool even in the hottest noons, mysterious, a little sinister, the soughing pines seeming to wait with an age-old patience, to threaten with soft sighs: Be careful! Be careful! We had you once. We can take you back again."

"Supposed I don't want to redeem myself? Why should I fight to uphold the system that cast me out? I shall take pleasure in seeing it smashed."

"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."

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

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

"The cause didn't seem sacred to her. The war did not seem to be holy affair."

"The land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it's the only thing that lasts."

"The merciful adjustment which nature makes when what cannot be cured must be endured."

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

"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."

"The most insane gossip tortured the town."

"The week passed by swiftly, like a dream... a dream where minutes flew as rapidly as heartbeats. Such a breathless week when something within her drove Scarlett with mingled pain and pleasure to pack and cram every minute with incidents to remember after he was gone, happenings which she could examine at leisure in the long months ahead, extracting every morsel of comfort from them - dance, sing, laugh, fetch and carry for Ashley, anticipate his wants, smile when he smiles, be silent when he talks, follow him with your eyes so that each line of his erect body, each lift of his eyebrows, each quirk of his mouth, will be indelibly printed on your mind - for a week goes by so fast and the war goes on forever."

"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely on her shoulders now. She was twenty-five and looked it, and so there has no longer any need to try to be attractive."

"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."

"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."

"The usual masculine disillusionment is discovering that a woman has a brain."

"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."

"Then you've made the only choice. But there's a penalty attached, as there is to most things you want. It's loneliness."

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