Erma Bombeck Quotes
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In general my children refuse to eat anything that hasn't danced in television.
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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.
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Don't confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.
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There is nothing more miserable in the world than to arrive in paradise and look like your passport photo.
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The more I think about it, the more there is to be said for the sloth. He sleeps fifteen to eighteen hours a day and is known to have taken forty-eight days to travel four miles. He hangs in the trees after he's dead. But he lives longer than the cheetah.
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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.
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It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.
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If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it.
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It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.
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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.
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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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I have never understood, for example, how come a child can climb up on the roof, scale the TV antenna, and rescue the cat ... yet cannot walk down the hallway without grabbing both walls with his grubby hands for balance.
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To my way of thinking, the American family started to decline when parents began to communicate with their children.
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I learned the importance of a man's chair early in life. I learned that he may love several wives, embrace several cars, be true to more than one political philosophy, and be equally committed to several careers, but he will have only one comfortable chair in his life. I learned it will be an ugly chair. It will match nothing in the entire house. It will never wear out.
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With girls, everything looks great on the surface. But beware of drawers that won't open. They contain a three-month supply of dirty underwear, unwashed hose, and rubber bands with blobs of hair in them.
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Just think of all those women on the Titanic who said, 'No thank you' to desert that night. And for what?!
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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.
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Families aren't easy to join. They're like an exclusive country club where membership makes impossible demands and the dues for an outsider are exorbitant.
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Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.
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When children reach the age of sixteen, they discover the meaning of life: car keys.
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If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.
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A friend doesn't go on a diet because you are fat. A friend never defends a husband who gets his wife an electric skillet for her birthday. A friend will tell you she saw your old boyfriend -- and he's a priest.
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I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.
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People usually survive their illnesses, but the paper work eventually does them in. Filing a claim for insurance is terminal.