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Success is outliving your failures
Erma Bombeck
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I don't think women outlive men, Doctor. It only seems longer.
Erma Bombeck
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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.
Erma Bombeck
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I have always felt that too much time was given before the birth, which is spent learning things like how to breathe in and out with your husband (I had my baby when they gave you a shot in the hip and you didn't wake up until the kid was ready to start school), and not enough time given to how to mother after the baby is born.
Erma Bombeck
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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.
Erma Bombeck
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Grandparenthood is one of life's rewards for surviving your own children.
Erma Bombeck
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Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the 'Titanic' who waved off the dessert cart.
Erma Bombeck
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You always hear about fashion's success stories. How a starlet lost an earring one night and by the next morning, the entire country was wearing one earring. Or how sweaters made a comeback in a drugstore, or a First Lady influenced how we dressed during her reign. But what about the losers? The fashions that came and went out the same day? The hopes and dreams of designers that were shattered by the sound of fifty million women ... laughing themselves to death.
Erma Bombeck
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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.
Erma Bombeck
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Know the difference between success and fame. Success is Mother Teresa. Fame is Madonna.
Erma Bombeck
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Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.
Erma Bombeck
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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.
Erma Bombeck
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Most women put off entertaining until the kids are grown.
Erma Bombeck
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I have just come up with a wonderful solution to end all wars. Let me give directions on how to get there.
Erma Bombeck
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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?
Erma Bombeck
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Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter productivity.
Erma Bombeck
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Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.
Erma Bombeck
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Spend at least one Mother's Day with your respective mothers before you decide on marriage. If a man gives his mother a gift certificate for a flu shot, dump him.
Erma Bombeck
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No baby shall at any time be quartered in a house where there are no soft laps, no laughter, or no love.
Erma Bombeck
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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.
Erma Bombeck
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When you're lecturing teenagers and they begin to hum and leave the room, you can sense there is hostility.
Erma Bombeck
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Kids need love the most when they're acting most unlovable.
Erma Bombeck
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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.
Erma Bombeck
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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.
Erma Bombeck
