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Divorce
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“If you feel like getting a divorce, you are no exception to the general rule.”
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“... the divorced person is like a man with a black patch over one eye: he looks rather dashing but the fact is that he has been through a maiming experience.”
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“When we discuss those we love with those who do not love them, the end of love is near.”
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“If you made a list of the reasons why any couple got married, and another list of the reasons for their divorce, you'd have a hell of a lot of overlapping.”
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“It is difficult to tell which gives some couples the most happiness, the minister who marries them, or the judge who divorces them.”
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“Love, the quest; marriage, the conquest; divorce, the inquest.”
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“When two people decide to get a divorce, it isn't a sign that they 'don't understand' one another, but a sign that they have, at last, begun to.”
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“Reno! The land of the free and the grave of the home!”
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“... being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck. If you live through it, you start looking very carefully to the right and to the left. ”
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“A lawyer is never entirely comfortable with a friendly divorce, any more than a good mortician wants to finish his job and then have the patient sit up on the table.”
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“Divorce is as old as marriage. Since the very earliest times, men and women have lived together in the promise of love, have waited vainly for that promise to be fulfilled, and have separated when that promise was forgotten by one or the other — or by both.”
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“I'm not upset about my divorce. I'm only upset that I'm not a widow. ”
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“... it's just failure, that's what divorce is. But let me tell you, my dear, there's going to be more and more of it, until women get to training their sons for marriage as if it were a business.”
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“Real divorce takes place without a decree ... ”
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“She regarded divorce as a practical aid to monogamous living.”
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“... in the dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the same time ...”
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“Divorce is the psychological equivalent of a triple coronary by-pass. After such a monumental assault on the heart, it can take a whole decade to amend all the habits and attitudes that led up to it.”
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“Divorce exposes absolutely ever buried assumption about marriage ... how a husband's sense of entitlement and a wife's sense of duty turned the principle of 'our money, our kids' into the reality of 'his money, her kids.'”
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“The best remedy for a bruised heart is not, as so many people seem to think, repose upon a manly bosom. Much more efficacious are honest work, physical activity, and the sudden acquisition of wealth.”
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“After all, my erstwhile dear, / My no longer cherished, / Need we say it was not love, / Just because it perished?”
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“Divorce is the one human tragedy that reduces everything to cash.”
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“Divorce: fission after fusion.”
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“As for breaking up, once the relationship is over, you never really know what went wrong; you just feel nauseous whenever the subject comes to mind. After a plane crash there's the black box that tells the FAA what caused the crack-up. Too bad there's no black box of relationships.”
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“If you leave me, can I come too?”
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“There is rhythm to the ending of marriage just like the rhythm of courtship — only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally, you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses. The death occurred much earlier.”
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“Divorce is my generation's coming of age ceremony — a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.”
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“She wasn't pleased a second daughter had split with her husband and we tried to keep out of each other's way. Stones of silent condemnation were thrown from every direction, relatives and friends who believed 'bad wives' were bad people.”
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“Falling out of love / is a rusty chain going quickly through a winch. / It hurts more than you will remember.”
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“Love dies because its birth was an error.”
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“I have always regarded divorce as essentially disagreeable, like castor oil, but necessary.”
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“The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved.”
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“I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.”
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“I am still divorcing him, / adding up the crimes / Of how he came to me, / how he left me.”
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“I smother in the house in the valley below, / Let me out to the dark, let me go, let me go.”
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“However often marriage is dissolved, it remains indissoluble. Real divorce, the divorce of heart and nerve and fiber, does not exist, since there is no divorce from memory.”
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“In Reno, there is always a bull market, never a bear market, for the stocks and bonds of happiness.”
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“If it is right to be legally married, it is right to be legally divorced ... To be deprived of a Divorce is like being shut up in prison because someone attempted to kill you. It is just as honorable to get out of matrimonial trouble legally, as to be freed from any other wrong.”
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“[After Senator Birch Bayh welcomed newly elected senators by congratulating the good judgment of their constituents:] No, Birch, that's not why all these gentlemen are assembled around our table tonight. They are here, Birch, because, Birch all their opponents made the mistake of divorcing their wives, Birch.”
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“We were far more civilized in our divorce than we had ever been in marriage. It seemed we'd finally found something we could do together amicably.”
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“Only in a sexist society can the breakup of a marriage actually improve the economic well-being of the father, cause the mother and children to suffer a large drop in economic status, and permit most fathers to provide little or no support to their children.”
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“Our breakup was the result of many things: a wrong beginning, bad timing, years and years of thinking habit and silence were the same as intimacy.”
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“So many persons think divorce a panacea for every ill, who find out, when they try it, that the remedy is worse than the disease.”
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“There is cruelty in divorce. There is cruelty in forced or unfortunate marriage. We will continue to cry at weddings because we know how bittersweet, how fragile is the truth. We will always need legal divorce just as an emergency escape hatch is crucial in every submarine. No sense, however, in denying that after every divorce someone will be running like a cat, tin cans tied to its tail: spooked and slowed down.”
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“The divorce will be gayer than the wedding.”
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“... a divorce? That's a door that makes a noise.”
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“Odds are, today's soulmate is tomorrow's plaintiff.”
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“A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there's less of you.”
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“At last free, / at last I am a woman free! / No more tied to the kitchen, stained amid the stained pots, / no more bound to the husband / who thought me less / than the shade he wove with his hands.”
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“No marriage is one person's failure any more than it's one person's success, so it works best to see a marriage that has ended simply as something that didn't work out.”
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“Perhaps the old view of 'Me breadwinner, you hausfrau' worked for our grandparents, when people obligingly popped off before boring each other to death, but it won't work any longer because we are living too long and divorce is needed today to do what death acomplished more economically before.”
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“I wonder, now and then, if the prevalence of divorce has any connection to the decline of home cooking?”
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“... my marriage ... sprang a leak and had to be towed into court.”
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“There is something fantastic about getting divorced. Everyone should do it to experience the extraordinary sense of freedom after being in marriage jail.”
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“He taught me housekeeping; when I divorce I keep the house.”
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“I'm going to divorce him, but I will wait until after Christmas. I don't want to be alone for the holidays.”
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“Divorce is a serious operation which leaves scars forever.”
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“... she would never have been able to trust a divorced man. They came to you with experience in divorce.”
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“Divorce is only less painful than the need for divorce.”
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“... is there anything sweeter in life than an ex-spouse who has aged worse than you?”
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“The reason I left my husband was because he believed in the triple standard of morality, one for me and two for himself.”
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“[Alimony:] Billing minus cooing.”
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“An ex-wife is a woman with a crick in the neck from looking back over her shoulder at her matrimony.”
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“Oh, was it I or was it you, / That broke the subtle chain that ran / Between us two, between us two, — / Oh, was it I or was it you?”
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“There can be no summary and dramatic end to a marriage — only a slow and painful unravelling of a tangled skein of threads too stubborn to be broken.”
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“My divorce began less than a week before we were married.”
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“I would like there to be an eighth sacrament: the sacrament of divorce. Like Communion, it is a slim white wafer on the tongue. Like confession, it is forgiveness. Forgiveness is important not so much because we've done wrong as because we feel we need to be forgiven. Family, friends, God, whoever loves us forgives us, takes us in again. They are thrilled by our life, our possibilities, our second chances.”
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“Divorce is the death of dreams.”
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“Divorce is one of the loneliest of modern rituals. Before, during, and after the actual culmination of the legal process it is an ordeal that rips people away from their roots, their important relationships, and a part of themselves. There is really nothing like it — except perhaps war.”
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“The rules of marriage were simple and easy to follow: faithfulness, patience, compromise. But there were no rules to divorce, or if there were, he had not yet discovered them.”
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“For some reason, we see divorce as a signal of failure despite the fact that each of us has a right and an obligation to rectify any other mistake we make in life.”
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“The anger surfaces, of course, and the sheer frustration that once we had a marriage, and now all we seem to share are headlines and joint custody of many high-priced attorneys.”
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“More divorces start in the bedroom than in any other room in the house.”