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Erma Bombeck (quotes)
- Housework can kill you if done right.
- Never accept a drink from a urologist.
- The term ‘working mother’ is redundant.
- When humor go’s, there go’s civilization.
- I am not a glutton – I am an explorer of food
- Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.
- Never order food in excess of your body weight.
- No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed.
- If you can’t make it better, you can laugh at it.
- Written on her tombstone: “I told you I was sick.
- When the going gets tough, the tough make cookies.
- Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
- Never have more children than you have car windows.
- How come anything you buy will go on sale next week?
- There is so much to teach, and the time goes so fast.
- A child needs your love most when he deserves it least
- My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.
- Housework, if it is done properly, can cause brain damage.
- I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.
- Kids need love the most when they’re acting most unlovable.
- Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.
- When you look like your passport photo, it’s time to go home.
- It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.
- I don’t think women outlive men, Doctor. It only seems longer.
- It would have been a wonderful wedding – had it not been mine.
- A grandmother pretends she doesn’t know who you are on Halloween.
- It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line.
- I didn’t fight my way to the top of the food chain to be a vegetarian.
- Mother’s words of wisdom: Answer me! Don’t talk with food in your mouth!
- Grandparenthood is one of life’s rewards for surviving your own children.
- Don’t worry about who doesn’t like you, who has more, or who’s doing what.
- The Rose Bowl is the only bowl I’ve ever seen that I didn’t have to clean.
- Don’t confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.
- I’ve exercised with women so thin that buzzards followed them to their cars.
- I do not participate in any sport with ambulances at the bottom of the hill.
- With boys, you always know where you stand. Right in the path of a hurricane.
- Sometimes I can’t figure designers out. It’s as if they flunked human anatomy.
- Pregnancy is the only time in a woman’s life she can help God work a miracle.
- I worry about scientists discovering that lettuce has been fattening all along.
- If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.
- When children reach the age of sixteen, they discover the meaning of life: car keys.
- The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.
- No self-respecting mother would run out of intimidations on the eve of a major holiday.
- There’s nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.
- Cleaning the house while the children are home is like shoveling while it’s still snowing.
- There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.
- Laughter rises out of tragedy when you need it the most, and rewards you for your courage.
- In two decades I’ve lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.
- Marriage has no guarantees. If that’s what you’re looking for, go live with a car battery.
- Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the ‘Titanic’ who waved off the dessert cart.
- It is my theory you can’t get rid of fat. All you can do is move it around, like furniture.
- Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they’re not trying to keep up with you.
- Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?
- For years, my husband and I have advocated separate vacations. But the kids keep finding us.
- What’s with you men? Would hair stop growing on your chest if you asked directions somewhere?
- One never realizes how different a husband and wife can be until they begin to pack for a trip.
- Who in their infinite wisdom decreed that Little League uniforms be white? Certainly not a mother.
- Once you see the drivers in Indonesia you understand why religion plays such a part in their lives.
- When my kids become wild and unruly, I use a nice, safe playpen. When they’re finished, I climb out.
- It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.
- Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter productivity.
- It’s frightening to wake up one morning and discover that while you were asleep you went out of style.
- It hangs heavy for the bored, eludes the busy, flies by the for young, and runs out for the aged.
- No baby shall at any time be quartered in a house where there are no soft laps, no laughter, or no love.
- A grandparent is the only baby-sitter who doesn’t charge more after midnight – or anything before midnight.
- My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.
- I got to thinking one day about all those women on the Titanic who passed up dessert at dinner that fateful night.
- I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: ‘Checkout Time is 18 years.’
- If I had my life to live over I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage.
- The odds of going to the store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread are three billion to one.
- Giving birth is little more than a set of muscular contractions granting passage of a child. Then the mother is born.
- On Being Blonde: Wit and Wisdom from the World’s Most Infamous Blondes. Book by Paula Munier, p. 67, September 1, 2004.
- Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It’s too controversial.
- One certainty when you travel is the moment you arrive in a foreign country, the American dollar will fall like a stone.
- My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.
- When a child is locked in the bathroom with water running and he says he’s doing nothing but the dog is barking, call 911.
- Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It’s unbridled, its unplanned, it’s full of suprises.
- All of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.
- A grandparent will help you with your buttons, your zippers, and your shoelaces and not be in any hurry for you to grow up.
- I have seen my kid struggle into the kitchen in the morning with outfits that need only one accessory: an empty gin bottle.
- What makes people laugh? . . . It’s a happy marriage between a person who needs to laugh and someone who’s got one to give.
- People usually survive their illnesses, but the paper work eventually does them in. Filing a claim for insurance is terminal.
- There’s something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she’s only measured water in it.
- As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.
- It seemed rather incongruous that in a society of super sophisticated communication, we often suffer from a shortage of listeners.
- I have a friend who lives by a three-word philosophy: Seize the Moment. Just possibly, she may be the wisest woman on this planet.
- . . . but mostly, given another shot at life, I would seize every minute – look at it and really see it – live it – and never give it back.
- The hippopotamus is a vegetarian and looks like a wall. Lions who eat only red meat are sleek and slim. Are nutritionists on the wrong track?
- Women are never what they seem to be. There is the woman you see and there is the woman who is hidden. Buy the gift for the woman who is hidden.
- Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.
- I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes.
- When you leave them in the morning, they stick their nose in the door crack and stand there like a portrait until you turn the key eight hours later.
- When your mother asks, ‘Do you want a piece of advice?’ it is a mere formality. It doesn’t matter if you answer yes or no. You’re going to get it anyway.
- My theory on housework is, if the item doesn’t multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one else cares. Why should you?
- Youngsters of the age of two and three are endowed with extraordinary strength. They can lift a dog twice their own weight and dump him into the bathtub.
- When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me’.
- I haven’t trusted polls since I read that 62% of women had affairs during their lunch hour. I’ve never met a woman in my life who would give up lunch for sex.
- Have you any idea how many children it takes to turn off one light in the kitchen Three. It takes one to say What light and two more to say I didn’t turn it on.
- On vacations: We hit the sunny beaches where we occupy ourselves keeping the sun off our skin, the saltwater off our bodies, and the sand out of our belongings.
- I didn’t fear old age. I was just becoming increasingly aware of the fact that the only people who said old age was beautiful were usually twenty-three years old.
- Volunteers are the only human beings on the face of the earth who reflect this nation’s compassion, unselfish caring, patience, and just plain love for one another.
- What we’re really talking about is a wonderful day set aside on the fourth Thursday of November when no one diets. I mean, why else would they call it Thanksgiving?
- I just clipped 2 articles from a current magazine. One is a diet guaranteed to drop 5 pounds off my body in a weekend. The other is a recipe for a 6 minute pecan pie.
- Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.
- One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child’s name and how old he or she is.
- Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I’m taking with me when I go.
- Motherhood isn’t just a series of contractions; it’s a state of mind. From the moment we know life is inside us, we feel a responsibility to protect and defend that human being.
- Some emotions don’t make a lot of noise. It’s hard to hear pride. Caring is real faint – like a heartbeat. And pure love – why, some days it’s so quiet, you don’t even know it’s there.
- I firmly believe kids don’t want your understanding. They want your trust, your compassion, your blinding love and your car keys, but you try to understand them and you’re in big trouble.
- Cleanliness is not next to godliness. It isn’t even in the same neighborhood. No one has ever gotten a religious experience out of removing burned-on cheese from the grill of the toaster oven.
- Those magazine dieting stories always have the testimonial of a woman who wore a dress that could slipcover New Jersey in one photo and thirty days later looked like a well-dressed thermometer.
- For the first two years of a child’s life, we spend every waking hour tryibg to get the child to communicate. Then we spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out how we can reverse the process.
- Good kids are like sunsets. We take them for granted. Every evening they disappear. Most parents never imagine how hard they try to please us, and how miserable they feel when they think they have failed.
- It is ludicrous to read the microwave direction on the boxes of food you buy, as each one will have a disclaimer: THIS WILL VARY WITH YOUR MICROWAVE. Loosely translated, this means, You’re on your own, Bernice.
- Friends are “annuals” that need seasonal nurturing to bear blossoms. Family is a “perennial” that comes up year after year, enduring the droughts of absence and neglect. There’s a place in the garden for both of them.
- If I had my life to live over, instead of wishing away nine months of pregnancy, I’d have cherished ever moment and realized that the wonderment growing inside me was the only chance in life to assist God in a miracle.
- I read one psychologist’s theory that said, “Never strike a child in your anger.” When could I strike him? When he is kissing me on my birthday? When he’s recuperating from measles? Do I slap the Bible out of his hand on Sunday?
- There is nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child. … Time, self-pity, apathy, bitterness, and exhaustion can take the Christmas out of the child, but you cannot take the child out of Christmas.
- People are always asking couples whose marriage has endured at least a quarter of a century for their secret for success. Actually, it is no secret at all. I am a forgiving woman. Long ago, I forgave my husband for not being Paul Newman.
- With boys you always know where you stand. Right in the path of a hurricane. It’s all there. The fruit flies hovering over their waste can, the hamster trying to escape to cleaner air, the bedrooms decorated in Early Bus Station Restroom.
- Motherhood is the second oldest profession in the world. It never questions age, height, religious preference, health, political affiliation, citizenship, morality, ethnic background, marital status, economic level, convenience, or previous experience.
- I remember thinking how often we look, but never see … we listen, but never hear … we exist, but never feel. We take our relationships for granted. A house is only a place. It has no life of its own. It needs human voices, activity and laughter to come alive.
- For years my wedding ring has done its job. It has led me not into temptation. It has reminded my husband numerous times at parties that it’s time to go home. It has been a source of relief to a dinner companion. It has been a status symbol in the maternity ward.
- Enter my first neighbor – a woman who spoke in complete, coherent sentences, who ate with a knife and fork and who only cried at weddings. I couldn’t help myself. In a dramatic gesture, I bolted the door and threw my body across it to prevent her exit. She understood.
- Everyone is guilty at one time or another of throwing out questions that beg to be ignored, but mothers seem to have a market on the supply. “Do you want a spanking or do you want to go to bed?” Don’t you want to save some of the pizza for your brother?” Wasn’t there any change?
- It’s the three pairs of eyes that mothers have to have…One pair that see through closed doors. Another in the back of her head…and, of course, the ones in front that can look at a child when he goofs up and reflect ‘I understand and I love you’ without so much as uttering a word.
- The family. We are a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms. . . and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.
- I see children as kites. You spend a lifetime trying to get them off the ground. You run with them until you’re both breathless. They crash . . . you add a longer tail . . . you patch and comfort, adjust and teach. You watch them lifted by the wind and assure them that someday they’ll fly.
- Making coffee has become the great compromise of the decade. It’s the only thing “real” men do that doesn’t seem to threaten their masculinity. To women, it’s on the same domestic entry level as putting the spring back into the toilet-tissue holder or taking a chicken out of the freezer to thaw.
- Most mothers entering the labor market outside the home are naive. They stagger home each evening, holding mail in their teeth, the cleaning over their arm, a lamb chop defrosting under each armpit, balancing two gallons of frozen milk between their knees, and expect one of the kids to get the door.
- Given another shot at life, I would seize every minute…look at it and really see it… live it…and never give it back. Stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t worry about who doesn’t like you, who has more, or who’s doing what. Instead, let’s cherish the relationships we have with those who do love us.
- Kids have little computer bodies with disks that store information. They remember who had to do the dishes the last time you had spaghetti, who lost the knob off the TV set six years ago, who got punished for teasing the dog when he wasn’t teasing the dog and who had to wear girls boots the last time it snowed.
- Kids are without a doubt the most suspicious diners in the world. They will eat mud (raw or baked) rocks, paste, crayons, ball-point pens, moving goldfish, cigarette butts, and cat food. Try to coax a little beef stew into their mouths and they look at you like a puppy when you stand over him with the Sunday paper rolled up.
- I love my mother for all the times she said absolutely nothing…. Thinking back on it all, it must have been the most difficult part of mothering she ever had to do: knowing the outcome, yet feeling she had no right to keep me from charting my own path. I thank her for all her virtues, but mostly for never once having said, “I told you so.
- You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.
- Mothers are not the nameless, faceless stereotypes who appear once a year on a greeting card with their virtues set to prose, but women who have been dealt a hand for life and play each card one at a time the best way they know how. No mother is all good or all bad, all laughing or all serious, all loving or all angry. Ambivalence rushes through their veins.
- I was a closet pacifier advocate. So were most of my friends. Unknown to our mothers, we owned thirty or forty of those little suckers that were placed strategically around the house so a cry could be silenced in less than thirty seconds. Even though bottles were boiled, rooms disinfected, and germs fought one on one, no one seemed to care where the pacifier had been.
- When mothers talk about the depression of the empty nest, they’re not mourning the passing of all those wet towels on the floor, or the music that numbs your teeth, or even the bottle of capless shampoo dribbling down the shower drain. They’re upset because they’ve gone from supervisor of a child’s life to a spectator. It’s like being the vice president of the United States.
- Adults are always telling young people, ‘These are the best years of your life.’ Are they? I don’t know. Sometimes when adults say this to children I look into their faces. They look like someone on the top seat of the Ferris wheel who has had too much cotton candy and barbecue. They’d like to get off and be sick but everyone keeps telling them what a good time they’re having.
- If I had my life to live over again, I would have waxed less and listened more. … I would have cried and laughed less while watching television … and more while watching real life. … But mostly, given another shot at life, I would seize every minute of it … look at it and really see it … try it on … live it … exhaust it … and never give the minute back until there was nothing left of it.
- He opened the jar of pickles when no one else could. He was the only one in the house who wasn’t afraid to go into the basement by himself. He cut himself shaving, but no one kissed it or got excited about it. It was understood when it rained, he got the car and brought it around to the door. When anyone was sick, he went out to get the prescription filled. He took lots of pictures… but he was never in them.
- There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, ‘Yes, I’ve got dreams, of course I’ve got dreams.’ Then they put the box away and bring it out once in awhile to look in it, and yep, they’re still there. These are great dreams, but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say, ‘How good or how bad am I?’ That’s where courage comes in.
- I am always behind the shopper at the grocery store who has stitched her coupons in the lining of her coat and wants to talk about a ‘strong’ chicken she bought two weeks ago. The register tape also runs out just before her sub-total. In the public restroom, I always stand behind the teen-ager who is changing into her band uniform for a parade and doesn’t emerge until she has combed the tassels on her boots, shaved her legs, and recovered her contact lens from the commode.
- Someday, when my children are old enough to understand the logic that motivates a mother, I’ll tell them: I loved you enough to bug you about where you were going, with whom and what time you would get home. … I loved you enough to be silent and let you discover your friend was a creep. I loved you enough to make you return a Milky Way with a bite out of it to a drugstore and confess, ‘I stole this.’ … But most of all I loved you enough to say no when you hated me for it. That was the hardest part of all.
