Margaret Mitchell (1900–49,) fully Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell Marsh, was an American author and journalist. She is the author of the famous novel Gone with the Wind (1936.) This, her only novel, was for many years the most significant publishing success ever.
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Mitchell grew up hearing stories of the Confederacy. She studied at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, for a medical career but turned to journalism. She was a reporter for the Atlanta Journal for six years.
Mitchell spent ten years researching and writing Gone with the Wind (1936,) her panoramic romantic tale of the Civil War and Reconstruction from a Southern point of view. The story’s protagonist, Scarlett O’Hara, is a determined Southern belle who survives the hardships of the war, establishes a successful business on the back of rebuilding the South, and endures a series of marriages and failed love affairs with other men.
Gone with the Wind earned Mitchell a National Book Award and a Pulitzer. By the time Mitchell died at age 48, the book had sold 8 million copies in 40 countries. The book was adapted into a celebrated 1939 film starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. It made more money than any other movie for more than two decades.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Margaret Mitchell
Life’s under no obligation to give us what we expect.
—Margaret Mitchell
Topics: Acceptance, Obligation, Challenges, One liners, Expectation
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 pieces as long as I lived.
—Margaret Mitchell
Topics: Love, Moving on
Until you’ve lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.
—Margaret Mitchell
Topics: Reputation
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. Gone With The Wind
—Margaret Mitchell
Topics: People
With enough courage, you can do without a reputation.
—Margaret Mitchell
Topics: Reputation
Death and taxes and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them!
—Margaret Mitchell
Topics: Taxes, Taxation
I want peace. I want to see if somewhere there isn’t something left in life of charm and grace.
—Margaret Mitchell
Topics: Charm
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
There ain’t nothing from the outside can lick any of us.
—Margaret Mitchell
Topics: Confidence, Self-reliance
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
Topics: Assumptions
Her lips on his could tell him better than all her stumbling words.
—Margaret Mitchell
Topics: Kiss
The world can forgive practically anything except people who mind their own business.
—Margaret Mitchell
Topics: Forgiveness
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
Topics: Fighting, Fight
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