Mary Boykin Chesnut Quotes

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

Mary Boykin Chesnut

#2. Is anything worth it?

Mary Boykin Chesnut

#3. 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.

Mary Boykin Chesnut

#4. 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.

Mary Boykin Chesnut

#5. 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.

Mary Boykin Chesnut

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

Mary Boykin Chesnut

#7. Threatened men live long.

Mary Boykin Chesnut

#8. 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?

Mary Boykin Chesnut

#9. Women
wives and mothers
are the same everywhere.

Mary Boykin Chesnut

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

Mary Boykin Chesnut

#11. 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.

Mary Boykin Chesnut

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

Mary Boykin Chesnut

#13. 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.

Mary Boykin Chesnut

#14. Forgiveness is indifference. Forgiveness is impossible while love lasts.

Mary Boykin Chesnut

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

Mary Boykin Chesnut

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

Mary Boykin Chesnut

#17. I do not allow myself vain regrets or foreboding.

Mary Boykin Chesnut

#18. Of all our sorrows, memory is the worst.

Mary Boykin Chesnut

#19. I am always on the women's side.

Mary Boykin Chesnut

#20. I will laugh at the laughable while I breathe.

Mary Boykin Chesnut

#21. She died praying that she might die.

Mary Boykin Chesnut

#22. I think incompatibility of temper began when it was made plain to us that we get all the opprobrium of slavery while they, with their tariff, get the money there is in it.

Mary Boykin Chesnut

#23. 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.

Mary Boykin Chesnut

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

Mary Boykin Chesnut