Erma Bombeck Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Success is outliving your failures
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Hello there. I'm out social climbing, but if you leave your name and number and if you're anybody, I'll get back to you.
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Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.
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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.
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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.
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Never go to your high school reunion pregnant or they will think that is all you have done since you graduated.
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Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.
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Kids need love the most when they're acting most unlovable.
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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.
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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.
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Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter productivity.
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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.
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When you're lecturing teenagers and they begin to hum and leave the room, you can sense there is hostility.
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Most children's first words are 'Mama' or 'Daddy.' Mine were, 'Do I have to use my own money?'
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Maybe you know why a child can reject a hot dog with mustard served on a soft bun at home, yet eat six of them two hours later at fifty cents each.
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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.
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Grandparenthood is one of life's rewards for surviving your own children.
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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.
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Know the difference between success and fame. Success is Mother Teresa. Fame is Madonna.
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Poached eggs are good, poached animals are not.
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Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the 'Titanic' who waved off the dessert cart.
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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.