All 39 Uses of
brief
in
Gone with the Wind
Uses with a very common or rare meaning:
- With foreboding, Mammy had brought her young mistress a small package, addressed in a strange hand from New Orleans, a package containing a miniature of Ellen, which she flung to the floor with a cry, four letters in her own handwriting to Philippe Robillard, and a brief letter from a New Orleans priest, announcing the death of her cousin in a barroom brawl.†
Chpt 1.3
- There was a brief interval of whispering, and Pork entered, his usual dignity gone, his eyes rolling and his teeth a-gleam.†
Chpt 1.4
- Her recent graduation from a skinny pickaninny with brief skirts and stiffly wrapped braids into the dignity of a calico dress and starched white turban was an intoxicating affair.†
Chpt 2.8
- After these brief visits, Pitty always took to her bed for the rest of the day with tears and smelling salts.†
Chpt 2.8
- For a brief moment she considered the unfairness of it all.†
Chpt 2.9 *
- It came off with difficulty and for a brief instant was clutched tightly in the small palm.†
Chpt 2.9
- So the autumn months of 1862 went swiftly by with nursing, dancing, driving and bandage rolling taking up all the time she did not spend on brief visits to Tara.†
Chpt 2.12
- There'll be just one brief skirmish and the Yankees will skedaddle back into Tennessee.†
Chpt 3.17
- For a last brief moment, fear of a Yankee invasion clutched her heart but at the word "kiss," she forgot about it.†
Chpt 3.17
- He was smiling, but in the dark depths of his eyes a tiny light flickered for a brief moment, like a small raw flame.†
Chpt 3.17
- Scarlett held wobbling heads that parched lips might drink, poured buckets of water over dusty, feverish bodies and into open wounds that the men might enjoy a brief moment's relief.†
Chpt 3.18
- They were veterans now, veterans of brief service, but veterans just the same, and they had acquitted themselves well.†
Chpt 3.18
- Uncle Henry's visit was brief, for he had only a four-hour furlough and he needed half of it for the long walk in from the breastworks and back.†
Chpt 3.19
- For a week she had not heard from Tara and the last brief note from Gerald had added to her fears.†
Chpt 3.20
- Despite the fear that made it shrill, they recognized the voice of Sally Fontaine who, only an hour before, had stopped at Tara for a brief chat on her way to Jonesboro.†
Chpt 3.27
- For a brief instant Scarlett saw the long hot days in the cotton field, felt again the terrible ache in her back, the raw bruised flesh of her shoulders.†
Chpt 3.27
- Most of them wore blue overcoats of captured Yankees and, for a brief instant of horror, those at Tara thought Sherman's men had returned.†
Chpt 3.28
- She remembered the embarrassing and disgusting events of her brief honeymoon with Charles, his fumbling hands, his awkwardness, his incomprehensible emotions—and Wade Hampton.†
Chpt 4.32
- For a brief moment she wondered with impersonal curiosity what would be expected of a mistress.†
Chpt 4.32
- Scarlett said a brief prayer of thanksgiving that the rain of the previous night had ceased, for she had lain awake listening to it, knowing that it would mean the ruin of her velvet dress and new bonnet.†
Chpt 4.34
- Seeing her anxious glance, the nice officer pushed open a door and spoke brief low words to two privates who had leaped to their feet at his entrance.†
Chpt 4.34
- For a brief moment it was mid-summer and the afternoon skies were blue and she lay drowsily in the thick clover of Tara's lawn, looking up at the billowing cloud castles, the fragrance of white blossoms in her nose and the pleasant busy humming of bees in her ears.†
Chpt 4.34
- In two days she had a brief note from Will which she carried about with her and read and reread with mounting joy.†
Chpt 4.36
- In the brief period of the courtship, he thought he had never known a woman more attractively feminine in her reactions to life, ignorant, timid and helpless.†
Chpt 4.36
- Tony came in the dark and the lashing rain and in a few minutes he was gone back into the night forever, but in the brief interval between he raised the curtain on a scene of new horror, a curtain that she felt hopelessly would never be lowered again.†
Chpt 4.37
- Neither Frank nor Scarlett had mentioned Tony's brief visit, so the old lady could have revealed nothing, even had she been so inclined.†
Chpt 4.37
- For weeks after Tony's brief visit she woke from uneasy dreams at any sound in the road outside, fearing it might be Ashley trying to make his escape, fleeing to Texas because of the aid he had given Tony.†
Chpt 4.37
- Each letter from Melanie, saying that they were well, each brief note from Will reporting about the plowing, the planting, the growing of the cotton made her long anew to be home again.†
Chpt 4.38
- She did go home in June but not as she longed to go, for early in that month came a brief message from Will that Gerald was dead.†
Chpt 4.38
- Ashley began to read the prayers and all heads bowed as his resonant, beautifully modulated voice rolled out the brief and dignified words.†
Chpt 4.40
- The neighbors would have been shocked, aggrieved and indignant, had these brief prayers been all the service over the body of their loved friend, and no one knew this better than Ashley.†
Chpt 4.40
- His remote eyes came back to her swiftly and he smiled a brief smile that never reached his eyes.†
Chpt 4.41
- For a brief moment she thought what a fool this old man was, to fight for a state which had taken forty years from his life.†
Chpt 4.42
- Scarlett's mind was not working quickly and for a brief moment nothing made sense.†
Chpt 4.45
- He could be an ardent, almost a tender, lover for a brief while, and almost immediately a mocking devil who ripped the lid from her gunpowder temper, fired it and enjoyed the explosion.†
Chpt 5.48
- They were brief quarrels, short lived because it was impossible to keep a quarrel going with Rhett, who remained coolly indifferent to her hot words and waited his chance to pink her in an unguarded spot.†
Chpt 5.49
- And, except for her brief honeymoon interlude, she had not had fun in so long.†
Chpt 5.49
- Rhett went swiftly past her into the room and Melanie had a brief glimpse of him bending over the small naked baby in Mammy's lap before Dr. Meade shut the door.†
Chpt 5.50
- There was a merciful dullness in her mind now, a dullness that she knew from long experience would soon give way to sharp pain, even as severed tissues, shocked by the surgeon's knife, have a brief instant of insensibility before their agony begins.†
Chpt 5.63
Definition:
-
(meaning too common or rare to warrant focus) Brief is most commonly encountered as an adjective meaning "of short duration." Other meanings derive from the idea of short--as when making a long story short by summarizing it, or when wearing briefs (underwear).