# Quote — Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

> "It isn't that I mind splitting logs here in the mud, but I do mind what it stands for. I do mind, very much, the loss of the beauty of the old life I loved. Scarlett, before the war, life was beautiful. There was a glamor to it, a perfection and a completeness and a symmetry to it like Grecian art. Maybe it wasn't so to everyone. I know that now. But to me, living at Twelve Oaks, there was a real beauty to living. I belonged in that life. I was a part of it. And now it is gone and I am out of place in this new life, and I am afraid. Now, I know that in the old days it was a shadow show I watched. I avoided everything which was not shadowy, people and situations which were too real, too vital. I resented their intrusion. I tried to avoid you too, Scarlett. You were too full of living and too real and I was cowardly enough to prefer shadows and dreams."

- Author: [Margaret Mitchell](https://www.leafyquotes.com/margaret-mitchell.md)
- Book: [Gone with the Wind](https://www.leafyquotes.com/margaret-mitchell/gone-with-the-wind.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gone_with_the_Wind_(novel)#Quotes) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/margaret-mitchell/gone-with-the-wind/it-isnt-that

## More from this book

> "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. At least, it has been interesting, if not comfortable, to witness a Gotterdammerung."

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/margaret-mitchell/gone-with-the-wind/in-the-end.md)

> I cannot understand why I did not desert. It was all the purest insanity. But it’s in one’s blood. Southerners can never resist a losing cause.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/margaret-mitchell/gone-with-the-wind/i-cannot-understand.md)

> She was seeing through Rhett's eyes the passing, not of a woman but of a legend — the gentle, self-effacing but steel-spined women on whom the South had builded its house in war and to whose proud and loving arms it had returned in defeat.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/margaret-mitchell/gone-with-the-wind/she-was-seeing.md)