Mary Boykin Chesnut quotes:

Forgiveness is indifference. Forgiveness is impossible while love lasts.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

She died praying that she might die.

Threatened men live long.

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

I do not allow myself vain regrets or foreboding.

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.

I will laugh at the laughable while I breathe.

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

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

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

I am always on the women's side.

I will laugh at the laughable while I breathe

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.

Of all our sorrows, memory is the worst.

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.

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.

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