50 Heart-Wrenching Quotes About Divorce

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1.

My husband and I have never considered divorce…murder sometimes, but never divorce.
—Joyce Brothers

2.

In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce. The trick is to find, and continue to find, grounds for marriage.
—Robert Anderson

3.

When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children.
—Pat Conroy

4.

A divorce is like an amputation: You survive it, but there’s less of you.
—Margaret Atwood

5.

In our family we don’t divorce our men—we bury them.
—Ruth Gordon

6.

Divorce is an embarrassing public admission of defeat.
—Tracy Letts

7.

Losing a mate to death is devastating but it’s not a personal attack like divorce. When somebody you love stops loving you and walks away, it’s an insult beyond comparison.
—Sue Merrell

8.

I had a really good childhood up until I was nine, then a classic case of divorce really affected me.
—Kurt Cobain

9.

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!
—Mehmet Murat ildan

10.

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.
—Helen Rowland

11.

We ruined each other by being together. We destroyed each other’s dreams.
—Kate Chisman

12.

Such silence has an actual sound, the sound of disappearance.
—Suzanne Finnamore

13.

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 the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland.
—Elizabeth Gilbert

14.

Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
—Alain de Botton

15.

There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a 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 has occurred much earlier.
—Erica Jong

16.

There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that—what happened to that love—What happened to it, is what I’d like to know. I wish someone could tell me.
—Raymond Carver

17.

When people divorce, it’s always such a tragedy. At the same time, if people stay together it can be even worse.
—Monica Bellucci

18.

The real wonder is that anyone stays together, as impossible to live with and as broken as we all are.
—Kyran Pittman

19.

If you really want to get to know someone, you have to divorce him.
—Elizabeth Gilbert

20.

Divorce is probably as painful as death.
—William Shatner

21.

An arguing couple spiraling into negativity and teetering on the brink of divorce is actually mathematically equivalent to the beginning of a nuclear war.
—Hannah Fry

22.

Many a woman would get a divorce if she could do it without making her husband happy.
—Evan Esar

23.

I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.
—Rebecca West

24.

If there is such a thing as depression and despair, I experienced it during the months leading-up to and following the divorce. Insomnia, constant and uncontrollable thoughts and a deep sense of loss were among the conditions of my life. Was I depressed—yes, I was very much so and, what’s worse, was determined to do nothing immediately for it.
—H. Kirk Rainer

25.

Children must be considered in a divorce considered valuable pawns in the nasty legal and financial contest that is about to ensue.
—P. J. O’Rourke

26.

A defeatist attitude kills almost as many marriages as do affairs.
—Gary L. Thomas

27.

Divorce isn’t the child’s fault. Don’t say anything unkind about your ex to the child, because you’re really just hurting the child.
—Valerie Bertinelli

28.

She is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her.
—A. S. Byatt

29.

Divorce is a game played by lawyers.
—Cary Grant

30.

A horrible end is better than endless horror.
—Oliver Markus

31.

Divorce is the one human tragedy that reduces everything to cash.
—Rita Mae Brown

32.

The biggest financial pitfall in life is divorce. And the biggest reason for divorce is marriage.
—Gene Simmons

33.

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 by day, year by year, grinding. Instead of helping each other you just sliced away, picked at this or that. Goading. Endless goading. It became a cheap contest. And once you got into it, it became habitual. You couldn’t seem to get out. You almost didn’t want to get out. And then you did get out. All the way.
—Charles Bukowski

34.

Anybody who’s been through a divorce will tell you that at one point they’ve thought murder. The line between thinking murder and doing murder isn’t that major.
—Oliver Stone

35.

This is what I know about my parents. They spent the next several years trying to forget each other, and me.
—Raquel Cepeda

36.

I don’t think anybody who’s ever been divorced can tell you divorce is easy or fun or feels like anything other than a tremendous failure.
—Sharon Stone

37.

A lot of people have asked me how short I am. Since my last divorce, I think I’m about $100,000 short.
—Mickey Rooney

38.

It takes two to destroy a marriage.
–Margaret Trudeau

39.

Divorce is the psychological equivalent of a triple coronary bypass.
—Mary Kay Blakely

40.

I don’t miss him, I miss who I thought he was.
–Unknown

41.

I swear, if you existed I’d divorce you.
—Edward Albee

42.

Take this marriage thing seriously—it has to last all the way to the divorce.
—Roseanne Barr

43.

I can usually tell when a woman is going through a divorce because they look so gaunt and tired and sad. It’s just a huge sadness. It’s horrible. It’s like death. You mourn, but the person’s still there.
—Andie MacDowell

44.

Of the many horrors of divorce, the most egregious is that it robs a kid of the best of both worlds. Dads can do many things that even the best moms can’t, and vice versa.
—Rob Lowe

45.

It was a long time in the making, my divorce. One day became less special than the next, and pretty soon, we ceased all conversation. It is a sad day when you have nothing left to say.
—Ricki Lake

46.

My mother always said don’t marry for money, divorce for money.
—Wendy Liebman

47.

I am a divorced child, of divided, uncertain background. Within this division I—supposed fruit of their love—no longer exist. It happened nearly forty years ago, yet to me, nothing is sadder than my parents’ divorce.
—Sylvia Kristel

48.

I feel that marriage can lead to the ultimate rejection and failure and divorce and things we all fear.
—Mike Birbiglia

49.

Divorce is a 50-50 thing, and it can be a number of petty things that finally drive you out of your mind.
—Lee Radziwill

50.

My advice to Hillary would be to divorce that chump.
—Gennifer Flowers