How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
"Ah," said Melanie sadly, "what will the South be like without all our fine boys? What would the South have been if they had lived? We could use their courage and their energy and their brains. […]"
"There will never again be men like them," said Carreen softly. "No one can take their places." (29.70-71)
Carreen is specifically remembering her fiancé Brent Tarleton here. She's also getting at the tragedy for the South in having an entire generation of young men destroyed. And she's linking that to the lost past—the deaths in the Civil War end up consecrating the pre-Civil War South.
Quote #5
"It's a curse—this not wanting to look on naked realities. Until the war, life was never more real to me than a shadow show on a curtain. And I preferred it so. I do not like the outlines of things to be too sharp. I like them gently blurred, a little hazy."
[…]
"In other words, Scarlett, I am a coward." (31.90-92)
Ashley explains that his fascination with the past makes him a coward. Is this true? Or is it his whining on about how he's a coward that makes him a coward?
Quote #6
The old days had gone but these people would go their ways as if the old days still existed, charming, leisurely, determined not to rush and scramble for pennies as the Yankees did, determined to part with none of their old ways.
Scarlett knew that she, too, was greatly changed. […]
She could not ignore life. She had to live it […]. (35.177-179)
Here, the suggestion is that the old days are not exactly gone; instead they live on in those who remember them, and who maintain their morality. Moving forward, as Scarlett does, is a betrayal because the Yankees are the future. The past is a faith, which Scarlett wishes she shared but doesn't.