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Who really said it

Tomorrow is another day

Not quite — the actual line is “After all, tomorrow is another day!” Margaret Mitchell 1900–1949 · American novelist & journalist
The film didn’t originate the line, and neither did Mitchell coin the proverb — but the famous sentence is hers. In copyright

The sentence closes Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind (Macmillan, 30 June 1936), chapter 63: “After all, tomorrow is another day.” The 1939 film gives Scarlett the line essentially verbatim — the popular version simply drops Mitchell’s “After all,” which is the half of it that she actually wrote. The proverb inside it is anonymous and was already in print by 1600.

Last verified 16 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed wording — copy with the correction

“Tomorrow is another day” Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (1936), closing line. Spoken by Scarlett O'Hara in the 1939 film, which took the line verbatim from the novel.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The Estate of Margaret Mitchell; originally published by Macmillan (New York). The 1939 film is separately held by Warner Bros. (successor to Selznick International / MGM).). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Margaret Mitchell — American novelist & journalist. Theme: "Tomorrow is another day". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Tomorrow is another day". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The closing page of the novel

Work
Gone with the Wind, pt. 5, ch. 63 — the novel’s final line
First published
30 June 1936 · Macmillan, New York
Spoken by (1939 film)
Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) — a fictional character; screenplay credited solely to Sidney Howard, who did not write this sentence
Older than both
The proverb “To-morrow is another day” appears in England’s Helicon (1600), signed “Ignoto”

With the spirit of her people who would not know defeat, even when it stared them in the face, she raised her chin. She could get Rhett back. She knew she could. There had never been a man she couldn’t get, once she set her mind upon him.

“I’ll think of it all tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.” pt. 5, ch. 63

The last words of the novel. Searching the full text turns up the phrase exactly once in roughly 420,000 words — Mitchell spent the entire book getting to it. On screen, Scarlett reaches the same sentence via an added run-up (“Tara! Home. I’ll go home. And I’ll think of some way to get him back”), but the closing sentence itself is unchanged.

Full text of the 1936 novel
Read the closing chapter at Project Gutenberg Australia
Gone with the Wind, full text (Project Gutenberg Australia)

How this was checked

  • The film line, from a transcription, not memory. Wikiquote’s page for the 1939 film ↗ transcribes Scarlett’s speech ending “After all…tomorrow…is another day!” and heads the page “Written by Sidney Howard, based on the novel by Margaret Mitchell.” AFI independently lists it at #31 ↗ as “After all, tomorrow is another day!” Both keep “After all”; the popular quotation does not.
  • The novel outranks the film. The complete 1936 text at Project Gutenberg Australia ↗ ends: “Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.” The film’s version is that sentence, unaltered — so the screenplay cannot be its origin, whoever held the credit.
  • Mitchell didn’t coin the saying. Wiktionary treats it as an English proverb ↗ and cites a 1600 use of unknown authorship. That citation checks out against the scan: in A. H. Bullen’s edition of England’s Helicon ↗, “Phyllida’s Love-call to her Corydon” reads “Remember, remember, / To-morrow is another day,” and closes “Finis. Ignoto.” Phrase Finder likewise states Mitchell did not coin it ↗, citing Harper’s Weekly in 1857.
  • The title clinches Mitchell’s authorship of the sentence. Wikipedia’s article on the novel ↗ records that Mitchell tentatively titled the book Tomorrow Is Another Day, “from its last line,” before choosing a phrase from Ernest Dowson’s “Cynara” — independent confirmation that the line was hers and on her final page three years before any film existed.
In copyright

The sentence at issue first appeared in Gone with the Wind, published 30 June 1936 — well after the 1931 US public-domain cutoff, so it remains in copyright. Wikipedia notes the novel will not enter the US public domain until 1 January 2032 ↗. The bare proverb is ancient and unprotectable, and the 1600 England’s Helicon text is long public domain — but Mitchell’s sentence and the 1939 film are not. Note that the full text linked here is hosted by Project Gutenberg Australia, where the novel is public domain; it is not free to use in the United States.

Fact-check

Where the credit goes wrong

Nobody fabricated this one — the film is real, the character said it, and the sentence exists. But three different things get mixed up: who wrote the sentence, what the sentence is, and who coined the saying inside it.

“Tomorrow is another day” truncation

The quoted form drops the opening. Wikiquote’s transcription of the film renders it “After all…tomorrow…is another day!”, and AFI lists quote #31 as “After all, tomorrow is another day!” ↗ The novel agrees: “After all, tomorrow is another day.” “After all” is the part Mitchell added to the proverb — it is the only part that is original, and it is the part that gets cut.

The 1939 film / its screenwriters borrowed, not written

The line is commonly filed as a movie quote, but it is the last sentence of Mitchell’s 1936 novel, reproduced on screen without changes — the novel’s closing page ↗ reads “Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.” Sidney Howard holds the sole screen credit for the screenplay, but this sentence is not his invention.

Scarlett O’Hara / Vivien Leigh character, not author

Scarlett is a fictional character and Vivien Leigh is the actor who performed the line; neither wrote it. Quote collections that credit “Scarlett O’Hara” as the author are crediting a person who does not exist.

Sir Walter Raleigh disputed

The 1600 poem carrying “To-morrow is another day” is signed “Ignoto” — unknown. Its Victorian editor A. H. Bullen noted that the poem “has been ascribed, without the slightest authority, to Sir Walter Raleigh” ↗. This page names no poet, because the source does not.

Margaret Mitchell wrote “After all, tomorrow is another day” as the final line of Gone with the Wind in 1936; the 1939 film kept it word for word; and the proverb she built it from ↗ was already in print in 1600, by an author nobody knows.

Context

A proverb, a novel, then a film

The phrase does three jobs at once, and the credit gets lost between them. As a proverb it is old, anonymous and unremarkable — a stock English consolation, in print by 1600 and still ordinary enough that a New York Times interviewee reached for it in 2005. As a sentence it is Margaret Mitchell’s: she put the old saying in Scarlett O’Hara’s mouth, prefaced it with “After all,” and made it the final beat of a 1,000-page novel. As a movie quote it is a transcription — the 1939 film simply kept what Mitchell wrote.

The word doing the work is the one people drop. “Tomorrow is another day” is a platitude. “After all, tomorrow is another day” is a character refusing to accept an ending — the shrug of a woman who has just lost Rhett Butler and has decided, in the space of a comma, not to think about it yet. Mitchell knew what she had: she nearly called the book Tomorrow Is Another Day, after its own last line, before settling on a phrase from an Ernest Dowson poem.

Mitchell wrote the sentence. She did not write the saying — that one is 336 years older, and signed “Ignoto.”

How much of the film’s dialogue was actually written for the film?

Gone with the Wind’s screenplay is famously crowded: Sidney Howard’s draft was revised by Ben Hecht, Jo Swerling, Oliver H. P. Garrett, John Van Druten, Barbara Keon and producer David O. Selznick himself, though Howard received the sole screen credit ↗ and a posthumous Academy Award after dying in a farm-tractor accident before the premiere.

Selznick, in an October 1939 memo, described how little of the dialogue was invented: he claimed that of the material in the picture not drawn from the book, most was his own, with only a few original lines each from Howard, Hecht and Van Druten. The closing line was not among the inventions — it came straight off Mitchell’s last page. This is the same pattern as the film’s other famous exit line: Rhett’s “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” is in the novel too, as “My dear, I don’t give a damn.” There the film added a word. Here it added none.

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Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Gone with the Wind (film) — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Transcription of the film’s dialogue, giving Scarlett’s line as “After all…tomorrow…is another day!” and crediting the screenplay to Sidney Howard, based on Mitchell’s novel.
Gone with the Wind — full text (Project Gutenberg Australia)gutenberg.net.au

The complete 1936 novel. Its final sentence is the line in question; the phrase occurs exactly once in the whole book. (Public domain in Australia, not in the US.)
England’s Helicon (1600), ed. A. H. Bullenarchive.org

Scanned 1899 edition of the 1600 miscellany. “Phyllida’s Love-call to her Corydon” contains “To-morrow is another day” and is signed “Ignoto” — the earliest attestation this page could verify.
tomorrow is another day — Wiktionaryen.wiktionary.org

Treats the phrase as an English proverb and dates it with citations from 1600 (author unknown), 1896, Mitchell’s chapter 63, and 2005.
AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movie Quoteswww.afi.com

The American Film Institute’s official list, which ranks the line #31 in the fuller form: “After all, tomorrow is another day!”
Tomorrow Is Another Day — Phrase Finderwww.phrases.org.uk

States plainly that Mitchell did not coin the expression, citing an 1857 appearance in Harper’s Weekly.

The author of the real line

Who actually wrote it

Margaret Mitchell

1900–1949 · American novelist & journalist

Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an Atlanta journalist who wrote one novel. Gone with the Wind, published by Macmillan on 30 June 1936, won the Pulitzer Prize and became one of the best-selling novels in American history; she resisted pressure to write a sequel until her death in 1949. She briefly considered titling the book “Tomorrow Is Another Day” — taken from its own last line, the very sentence at issue here.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. New York: Macmillan, 1936, pt. 5, ch. 63 (closing line). Line carried into Gone with the Wind, dir. Victor Fleming, screenplay credited to Sidney Howard (Selznick International Pictures / MGM, 1939). Proverb attested earlier in England’s Helicon (London, 1600), “Phyllida’s Love-call to her Corydon, and his Replying,” signed “Ignoto.”

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Tomorrow is another day’?” Last verified 16 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/tomorrow-is-another-day

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