Erma Bombeck Quotes
I will never understand children. I never pretended to. I meet mothers all the time who make resolutions to themselves. 'I'm going to ... go out of my way to show them I am interested in them and what they do. I am going to understand my children.' These women end up making rag rugs, using blunt scissors.
Quotes to Explore
-
Telling people not to have children is unthinkable and inhumane.
-
Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.
-
Yiddish, originally, in Eastern Europe was considered the language of children, of the illiterate, of women. And 500 years later, by the 19th century, by the 18th century, writers realized that, in order to communicate with the masses, they could no longer write in Hebrew. They needed to write in Yiddish, the language of the population.
-
When students leave college, they are like children who know nothing about the problems of life, and don't have a political stance.
-
I grew up in China, but I live in the U.S. and I want my children to understand what's going on over there. They ask me sometimes, 'Are we Chinese or Australians?' My family are in L.A., New York and China, and they have the freedom to go back and forth, which is really, really nice.
-
You can't predict when a crisis might hit your family, whether it's with an elderly parent or with your children.
-
I really do feel very lucky. I've had my kids and my relationships. I've set my life down - I'm in my house, and I'm alone with my children - and I'm at peace, and that's a really nice feeling. All I really want in my life is to maintain that.
-
My mother and my sister are big Jon Snow fans.
-
My father was a dark-skinned brother, but my mother was a very fair-skinned lady. From what I understand, she was Creole; we think her people originally came from New Orleans. She looked almost like a white woman, which meant she could pass - as folks used to say back then. Her hair was jet-black. She was slim and very attractive.
-
Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.
-
I wanted to write with emotional honesty and tell a story people could connect with. And I wanted people to know how the foster system in America fails children; and how, at 18, they fall through the cracks. Then we can all work together and give support.
-
I didn't know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student - and later as wife and mother at the suburban edge of Dublin - suggested I had the wherewithal to do so. But I did have a unit of measurement. It was the measure of my own life.
-
My dad was a Muslim and would pray five times a day. I would pray with him as much as I could, in the morning before school. Sometimes he would tell us moralistic tales about genies, magic carpets and wondrous lands. My mother is not religious - she's just English.
-
The end of a novel, like the end of a children's dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums.
-
Children and one’s social inferiors never know when to say good-bye. One has to say it for them.
-
I want his children to know: wasn't anything strange about your daddy. It was strange what your daddy had to deal with.
-
My mother was really courageous.
-
Not because they were servants were we so reserved, for many noble persons are forced to serve through necessity, but by reason the vulgar sort of servants are as ill bred as meanly born, giving children ill examples and worse counsel.
-
Years later I would hear my father say the divorce had left him dating his children. That still meant picking us up every Sunday for a matinee and, if he had the money, an early dinner somewhere.
-
We sure didn't feel like refugees, but in hindsight, I guess we were - my father and mother left everything behind to come here - to be safe and give their boys a chance to rebuild a life.
-
I have a lot of security - I lost my mother to the Taliban because of a lack of security - and that explains partly why I can be so vocal.
-
The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
-
Two hundred and fifty mummies covered in gold. Something like this cannot be explained - mummy after mummy covered in shining gold.
-
I will never understand children. I never pretended to. I meet mothers all the time who make resolutions to themselves. 'I'm going to ... go out of my way to show them I am interested in them and what they do. I am going to understand my children.' These women end up making rag rugs, using blunt scissors.
