Erma Bombeck Quotes

I see children as kites. You spend a lifetime trying to get them off the ground. You run with them until you're both breathless. They crash . . . you add a longer tail . . . you patch and comfort, adjust and teach. You watch them lifted by the wind and assure them that someday they'll fly.

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

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, 'I used everything you gave me'.

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.

Someone once threw me a small, brown, hairy kiwi fruit, and I threw a wastebasket over it until it was dead.

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

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.

Never go to your high school reunion pregnant or they will think that is all you have done since you graduated.

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.

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.

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it.

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

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?

Someday, when my children are old enough to understand the logic that motivates a mother, I'll tell them: I loved you enough to bug you about where you were going, with whom and what time you would get home. ... I loved you enough to be silent and let you discover your friend was a creep. I loved you enough to make you return a Milky Way with a bite out of it to a drugstore and confess, 'I stole this.' ... But most of all I loved you enough to say no when you hated me for it. That was the hardest part of all.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.

Never have more children than you have car windows.

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.

What we're really talking about is a wonderful day set aside on the fourth Thursday of November when no one diets. I mean, why else would they call it Thanksgiving?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

It's the three pairs of eyes that mothers have to have...One pair that see through closed doors. Another in the back of her head...and, of course, the ones in front that can look at a child when he goofs up and reflect 'I understand and I love you' without so much as uttering a word.

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.

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.