100 Quotes by Erma Bombeck

Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?

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.

In two decades I've lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.

When my kids become wild and unruly, I use a nice, safe playpen. When they're finished, I climb out.

No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed.

I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

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.

If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.

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.

Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the 'Titanic' who waved off the dessert cart.

Cats invented self-esteem.

My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.

If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it.

It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.

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.

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.

It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.

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.

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?

I do not participate in any sport with ambulances at the bottom of the hill.

Never have more children than you have car windows.

I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: 'Checkout Time is 18 years.'

I am not a glutton - I am an explorer of food

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.

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.

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 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.

My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.

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.

It seemed rather incongruous that in a society of super sophisticated communication, we often suffer from a shortage of listeners.

Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter productivity.

Don't confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.

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.

I've exercised with women so thin that buzzards followed them to their cars.

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.

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.

He who laughs.....lasts.

There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.

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.

I got to thinking one day about all those women on the Titanic who passed up dessert at dinner that fateful night.

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.

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.

Who in their infinite wisdom decreed that Little League uniforms be white? Certainly not a mother.

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.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

A grandparent will help you with your buttons, your zippers, and your shoelaces and not be in any hurry for you to grow up.

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.

A grandparent is the only baby-sitter who doesn't charge more after midnight - or anything before midnight.

When the going gets tough, the tough make cookies.

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.

A grandmother pretends she doesn't know who you are on Halloween.

Onion rings in the car cushions do not improve with time.

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.

Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they're not trying to keep up with you.

In general my children refuse to eat anything that hasn't danced in television.

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.

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.

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.

My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.

Children make your life important.

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.

Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It's gossip.

Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.

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.

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.

Shopping is a woman thing. It's a contact sport like football. Women enjoy the scrimmage, the noisy crowds, the danger of being trampled to death, and the ecstasy of the purchase.

Kids need love the most when they're acting most unlovable.

Cleaning the house while the children are home is like shoveling while it's still snowing.

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.

Success is outliving your failures

It is my theory you can't get rid of fat. All you can do is move it around, like furniture.

The grass is always greener over the septic tank.

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?

When humor go's, there go's civilization.

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.

Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It's unbridled, its unplanned, it's full of suprises.

It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line.

Housework can kill you if done right.

How come anything you buy will go on sale next week?

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.

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?

Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It's too controversial.

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.

One never realizes how different a husband and wife can be until they begin to pack for a trip.

The fact that Americans drag around the world by the busloads to glimpse the past probably has something to do with the youth of our country. We revere anything older than George Burns.

People shop for a bathing suit with more care than they do a husband or wife. The rules are the same. Look for something you'll feel comfortable wearing. Allow for room to grow.

. . . 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.

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.

Laughter rises out of tragedy when you need it the most, and rewards you for your courage.

I didn't fight my way to the top of the food chain to be a vegetarian.

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.

Grandparenthood is one of life's rewards for surviving your own children.

Giving birth is little more than a set of muscular contractions granting passage of a child. Then the mother is born.

I worry about scientists discovering that lettuce has been fattening all along.

A child needs your love most when he deserves it least

Every puppy should have a boy.

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.

Encourage independence in your children by regularly losing them in the supermarket.

Sometimes I can't figure designers out. It's as if they flunked human anatomy.

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.

What makes people laugh? It's a happy marriage between a person who needs to laugh and someone who's got one to give.

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.

No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick.

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

Time. It hangs heavy for the bored, eludes the busy, flies by the for young, and runs out for the aged.

Once you see the drivers in Indonesia you understand why religion plays such a part in their lives.

For the first two years of a child's life, we spend every waking hour trying to get the child to communicate. Then we spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out how we can reverse the process.

I have seen my kid struggle into the kitchen in the morning with outfits that need only one accessory: an empty gin bottle.

Babies should enjoy the freedom to vocalize whether it be in church, a public meeting place, during a movie, or after hours when the lights are out. They have not yet learned that joy and laughter have to last a lifetime and must be conserved.

Never order food in excess of your body weight.

Housework, if it is done properly, can cause brain damage.

There is so much to teach, and the time goes so fast.

Never accept a drink from a urologist.

Let me put it this way. According to my girth, I should be a ninety-foot redwood.

There is one thing I have never taught my body how to do and that is to figure out at 6 A.M. what it wants to eat at 6 P.M.

Pregnancy is the only time in a woman's life she can help God work a miracle.

When you look like your passport photo, it's time to go home.

It's frightening to wake up one morning and discover that while you were asleep you went out of style.

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.

For years, my husband and I have advocated separate vacations. But the kids keep finding us.

Maybe age is kinder to us than we think. With my bad eyes, I can't see how bad I look, and with my rotten memory, I have a good excuse for getting out of a lot of stuff.

A member of the committee slapped a name tag over my left bosom. "What shall we name the other one?" I smiled. She was not amused.

The term 'working mother' is redundant.

No baby shall at any time be quartered in a house where there are no soft laps, no laughter, or no love.

If I had my life to live over I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage.

Any mother with half a skull knows that when Daddy's little boy becomes Mommy's little boy, the kid is so wet he's treading water.

It's [motherhood] the biggest on-the-job- training program in existence today.

People usually survive their illnesses, but the paper work eventually does them in. Filing a claim for insurance is terminal.

Never underestimate what it takes to watch someone you love in pain.

You show me a boy who brings a snake home to his mother and I'll show you an orphan.

I don't think women outlive men, Doctor. It only seems longer.

Don't worry about who doesn't like you, who has more, or who's doing what.

I would have invited friends over to dinner even if the carpet was stained, or the sofa faded.