Mary Boykin Chesnut Quotations

I think this journal will be disadvantageous for me, for I spend my time now like a spider spinning my own entrails.

Women--wives and mothers--are the same everywhere.

Brutal men with unlimited power are the same all over the world

I will laugh at the laughable while I breathe

Forgiveness is indifference. Forgiveness is impossible while love lasts.

She died praying that she might die.

I do not write often now - not for want of something to say, but from a loathing of all I see and hear. Why dwell upon it?

I am always on the women's side.

The weight that hangs upon our eyelids - is of lead.

Oh, if I could put some of my reckless spirit into these discreet cautious lazy men!

Richmond has fallen - and I have no heart to write about it... They are too many for us. Everythign lost in Richmond, even our archives. Blue-black is our horizon.

Is the sea drying up? It is going up into mist and coming down on us in this water spout, the rain. It raineth every day, and the weather represents our tearful despair on a large scale.

We are divorced, North from South, because we have hated each other so. If we could only separate politely, and not have a horrid fight for divorce.

Peace, comfort, quiet, happiness, I have found away from home. Only your own family, those nearest and dearest, can hurt you.

Of all our sorrows, memory is the worst.

Threatened men live long.

A freshet in the autumn does not compensate for a drought in the spring.

To think there are men who dare so defile a church, a sacred sanctuary dedicated to God. We have to hold up our skirts and walk tiptoe, so covered is the floor, the aisle and pews, with the dark shower of tobacco juice.

Darkest of all Decembers ever has my life known, Sitting here by the embers, stunned, helpless, alone.

I do not allow myself vain regrets or foreboding.

We are scattered, stunned; the remnant of heart left alive is filled with brotherly hate... Whose fault? Everybody blamed somebody else. Only the dead heroes left stiff and stark on the battlefield escape.

There is no slave, after all, like a wife...Poor women, poor slaves All married women, all children and girls who live in their father's house are slaves.