She belonged to Ashley, forever and ever.
With a heart that was heavy and a little bitter, she said: “You’ve been such a fool, Ashley. Why couldn’t you see that she was worth a million of me?
She whispered “Yes” before she even thought.
She thought without surprise, looking down from her height, that her shoulders were strong enough to bear anything now, having borne the worst that could ever happen to her. She could not desert Tara; she belonged to the red acres far more than they could ever belong to her. Her roots went deep into the blood-colored soil and sucked up life, as did the cotton.
I think we agreed on the occasion of our first meeting that you were no lady at all.
It hurts so terribly to cry, but not so much as not being able to cry.
Marriage, fun? Fiddle-dee-dee. Fun for men you mean.
Tara made her charming, but the war made her Scarlett O’Hara.
His one great flaw was making the terrible and exhilarating mistake of falling in love with Scarlett O’Hara.
All had suffered crushing misfortunes and had not been crushed. They had not been broken by the crash of empires, the machetes of revolting slaves, war, rebellion, proscription, confiscation. Malign fate had broken their necks, perhaps, but never their hearts. They had not whined, they had.
A hard little pain had started in her heart and was traveling slowly up toward her throat where it would become a lump and the lump would soon become tears.
If the people who started wars didn’t make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight?
Life was going past her, down a hot shady summer road, life with gray uniforms and jingling spurs and flowered organdie dresses and banjos playing.
This is war time. We can’t think of the proprieties now.
She could never love anything or anyone so selflessly as they did. What a lonely feeling it was – and she had never been lonely in either body or spirit before.
I should love you, for you are charming and talented at many useless accomplishments. But many ladies have charm and accomplishments and are just as useless as you are. No, I don’t love you. But I do like you tremendously – for the elasticity of your conscience, for the selfishness which you seldom trouble to hide, and for the shrewd practicality in you which, I fear, you get from some not too remote Irish-peasant ancestor.
How wonderful it would be never to marry but to go on being lovely in pale green dresses and forever courted by handsome men.
These women, so swift to kindness, so tender to the sorrowing, so untiring in times of stress, could be as implacable as furies to any renegade who broke one small law of their unwritten code. This code was simple. Reverence for the Confederacy, honor to the veterans, loyalty to old forms, pride in poverty, open hands to friends and undying hatred to Yankees. Between them, Scarlett and Rhett had outraged every tenet of this code.
A gentleman always appeared to believe a lady even when he knew she was lying. That was Southern chivalry. A gentleman always obeyed the rules and said the correct things and made life easier for a lady.
The hours dragged by and the black shadow of calamity brooded over the town, obscuring the hot sun until people looked up startled into the sky as if incredulous that it was clear and blue instead of murky and heavy with scudding clouds.