280 quotes found
“The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn't want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out th...”
“Divorce isn't such a tragedy. A tragedy's staying in an unhappy marriage, teaching your children the wrong things about love. Nobody ever died of divorce.”
“Taking a thing apart is always faster than putting something together. This is true of everything except marriage.”
“In college, I had a course in Latin, and one day the word "divorce" came up. I always figured it came from some root that meant "divide." In truth, it comes from "divertere," which means "to divert...”
“Divorce is a fire exit. When a house is burning, it doesn’t matter who set the fire. If there is no fire exit, everyone in the house will be burned!”
“Henri held herself as if only her arms could keep her pieced together, and I saw that behind all her fake control—throwing herself at a teacher, carving our dad out of her heart—was something fragi...”
“The bewilderment is the worst part. That’s what they don’t tell you in divorce articles. They talk about anger and loneliness and growing apart and starting over and being kind to yourself, but the...”
“She must ask; she must heal, and if she couldn’t heal, she must suffer, but if there was a chance, she must take it.”
“Maybe it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise, but like a tooth extraction, there was a moment of intense pain and then a numbing sense of loss. I was officially unmarried.”
“She didn’t know that loss was alive in the world, a thief always about to slam you and steal everything you had.”
“There’s never a right or wrong side in a divorce case, but, given the human capacity for hate, the breakup of a legal relationship so tied to emotion often brought out the worst in people.”
“People always say that once it goes away, you forget the pain. It’s a cliché of childbirth: you forget the pain. I don’t happen to agree. I remember the pain. What you really forget is love. Divorc...”
“That was the kind of life she’d had as a child, and it was the kind she wanted as an adult. But it hadn’t worked out that way. Things in life seldomdid, she’d come to understand”
“FatherMichael:OK we should get on with this; I don’t want to be late for my 2 o’clock. First I have to ask, is there anyone in here who thinks there is any reason why these two should not be marrie...”
“But the main problem with our marriages was not that our husbands wouldn’t share the housework but that we were unbelievably irritable young women and our husbands irritated us unbelievably. - The ...”
“She is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her.”
“Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he'd watched his own wife, a respectable nursery school t...”
“Bummer,' said Ira, his new word for "I must remain as neutral as possible" and "Your mother's a whore.”
“Hell, I'd even failed with women. Three wives. Nothing really wrong each time. It all got destroyed by petty bickering. Railing about nothing. Getting pissed-off over anything and everything. Day b...”
“She says what holds their marriage together is that she feels too damn sorry for him to ask for a divorce.”
