Time & Perspective Quote by Margaret Mitchell

A sugar-coated deferral that doubles as a survival tactic, "After all, tomorrow is another day" is Scarlett O'Hara's signature move: turn catastrophe into scheduling. The line lands not because it's profound, but because it's practical in the most morally slippery way. It gives despair a curfew. Whatever is burning down today - a home, a romance, a social order - can be postponed until morning, when the mind is better at bargaining with reality.

Mitchell writes it into a world where the old South's mythology is collapsing in real time. Against that historical wreckage, the sentence reads like a private spell of self-preservation, and also like an indictment. Scarlett's optimism isn't innocence; it's triage. She refuses the luxury of full grief because grief doesn't plant crops, pay debts, or keep predators at bay. That refusal is what makes her magnetic and unsettling: she can keep going, but the engine is denial sharpened into strategy.

The brilliance is in the casualness. "After all" pretends the conclusion is obvious, as if time itself is on her side, when the novel's deeper joke is that time isn't healing anything; it's changing the rules. "Another day" sounds like fresh possibility, yet it also implies repetition: more scrambling, more compromises, more reinventions. In the context of Gone with the Wind's Reconstruction-era turbulence, the line becomes less a promise than a coping mechanism for a character - and a culture - trying to outpace consequences.