Erma Bombeck famous quotes

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

#Family #Mom #Mother

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

#Dream #Courage #Kindness

Cats invented self-esteem.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Self Esteem #Cat #Self

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

#Memorable #Terrorism #Oblivion

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.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Funny Inspirational #Children #White

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Inspirational #Funny #Humorous

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

#Inspirational #Life #Laughter

There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Christmas #Spiritual #Morning

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

#4th Of July #Kids #Gun

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.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Religious #Cheese #Toasters

My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Funny #Kids #Car

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.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Summer #Mother #Hurt

Children make your life important.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Children #Important #Literature

When my kids become wild and unruly, I use a nice, safe playpen. When they're finished, I climb out.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Funny #Family #Mom

People shop for a bathing suit with more care than they do a husband or wife. The rules are the same. Look for something you'll feel comfortable wearing. Allow for room to grow.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Funny #Wedding #Husband

He opened the jar of pickles when no one else could. He was the only one in the house who wasn't afraid to go into the basement by himself. He cut himself shaving, but no one kissed it or got excited about it. It was understood when it rained, he got the car and brought it around to the door. When anyone was sick, he went out to get the prescription filled. He took lots of pictures... but he was never in them.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Daughter #Cutting #Doors

Have you any idea how many children it takes to turn off one light in the kitchen Three. It takes one to say What light and two more to say I didn't turn it on.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Children #Ideas #Two

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Happiness #Hurt #Laughter

I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Inspirational #Funny #Life

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.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Hilarious #Food #Odds

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.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Funny Friendship #Garden #Years

Never order food in excess of your body weight.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Badass #Order #Racist

It's [motherhood] the biggest on-the-job- training program in existence today.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Jobs #Motherhood #Training

With boys you always know where you stand. Right in the path of a hurricane. It's all there. The fruit flies hovering over their waste can, the hamster trying to escape to cleaner air, the bedrooms decorated in Early Bus Station Restroom.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Boys #Air #Trying

Never have more children than you have car windows.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Funny #Life #Witty

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

#Soccer #Sports #Football

No self-respecting mother would run out of intimidations on the eve of a major holiday.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Mother #Running #Holiday

In two decades I've lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Loss #Two #Literature

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.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Spring #Real #Coffee

When the going gets tough, the tough make cookies.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Cookies #Tough

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.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Mom #Mother #Years

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

#Inspiration #Car #Buzzards

I love my mother for all the times she said absolutely nothing.... Thinking back on it all, it must have been the most difficult part of mothering she ever had to do: knowing the outcome, yet feeling she had no right to keep me from charting my own path. I thank her for all her virtues, but mostly for never once having said, "I told you so.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Mother #Thinking #Knowing

Some emotions don't make a lot of noise. It's hard to hear pride. Caring is real faint - like a heartbeat. And pure love - why, some days it's so quiet, you don't even know it's there....
-- Erma Bombeck

#Real #Love You #Pride

When humor goes, there goes civilization.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Happiness #Laughter #Humor

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

#Mother #Men #Giving

Giving birth is little more than a set of muscular contractions granting passage of a child. Then the mother is born.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Mother #Children #Giving

Onion rings in the car cushions do not improve with time.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Car #Onions #Onion Rings

Youngsters of the age of two and three are endowed with extraordinary strength. They can lift a dog twice their own weight and dump him into the bathtub.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Dog #Two #Age

I got to thinking one day about all those women on the Titanic who passed up dessert at dinner that fateful night ...
-- Erma Bombeck

#Night #Thinking #One Day

Every puppy should have a boy.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Boys #Puppy #Should

Family life got better and we got our car back - as soon as we put 'I love Mom' on the license plate.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Funny #Family #Mom

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

#Pregnancy #Miracle #Wish

In general my children refuse to eat anything that hasn't danced in television.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Funny #Family #Children

On vacations: We hit the sunny beaches where we occupy ourselves keeping the sun off our skin, the saltwater off our bodies, and the sand out of our belongings.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Beach #Vacation #Skins

...I remember thinking how often we look, but never see...we listen, but never hear...we exist, but never feel. We take our relationships for granted. A house is only a place. It has no life of its own. It needs human voices, activity and laughter to come alive.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Laughter #Thinking #Voice

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.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Family #Country #Demand

No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Motivation #Women #Sleep

When you look like your passport photo, it's time to go home.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Travel #Home #Humor

We've got a generation now who were born with semiequality. They don't know how it was before, so they think, this isn't too bad. We're working. We have our attache' cases and our three piece suits. I get very disgusted with the younger generation of women. We had a torch to pass, and they are just sitting there. They don't realize it can be taken away. Things are going to have to get worse before they join in fighting the battle.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Taken #Memorable #Fighting

Cleaning the house while the children are home is like shoveling while it's still snowing.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Mom #Children #Home

Everyone is guilty at one time or another of throwing out questions that beg to be ignored, but mothers seem to have a market on the supply. "Do you want a spanking or do you want to go to bed?" Don't you want to save some of the pizza for your brother?" Wasn't there any change?
-- Erma Bombeck

#Mother #Brother #Bed

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

#Inspirational #Life #Communication

I don't know why no one ever thought to paste a label on the toilet-tissue spindle giving 1-2-3 directions for replacing the tissue on it. Then everyone in the house would know what Mama knows.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Giving #House #Labels

It was a bitter moment for us. We weren't two mature parents. We were just two kids playing grown-up. We still needed Mommy and Daddy's permission, blessings, and money to survive.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Kids #Blessing #Two

Just think of all those women on the Titanic who said, 'No thank you' to desert that night. And for what?!
-- Erma Bombeck

#Night #Thinking #Desert

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.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Family #Character #Trying

There is nothing more miserable in the world than to arrive in paradise and look like your passport photo.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Funny Life #Looks #World

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

#Funny #Running #Sex

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.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Mom #Mother #Children

The art of never making a mistake is crucial to motherhood. To be effective and to gain the respect she needs to function, a mother must have her children believe she has never engaged in sex, never made a bad decision, never caused her own mother a moment's anxiety, and was never a child.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Mother #Art #Sex

. . . but mostly, given another shot at life, I would seize every minute - look at it and really see it - live it - and never give it back.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Giving #Looks #Shots

The grass is always greener over the septic tank.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Tanks #Grass #Greener

For years my wedding ring has done its job. It has led me not into temptation. It has reminded my husband numerous times at parties that it's time to go home. It has been a source of relief to a dinner companion. It has been a status symbol in the maternity ward.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Inspirational #Funny #Marriage

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.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Family #Mother #Children

I just clipped 2 articles from a current magazine. One is a diet guaranteed to drop 5 pounds off my body in a weekend. The other is a recipe for a 6 minute pecan pie.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Weekend #Pie #Pecans

There's something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she's only measured water in it.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Mother #Fun #Water

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.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Home #Forever #Spices

Kids have little computer bodies with disks that store information. They remember who had to do the dishes the last time you had spaghetti, who lost the knob off the TV set six years ago, who got punished for teasing the dog when he wasn't teasing the dog and who had to wear girls boots the last time it snowed.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Girl #Dog #Kids

Never accept a drink from a urologist.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Drinking #Humor #Alcohol

Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It's too controversial.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Family #Food #Cereal

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

#Mother #Retirement #Children

One certainty when you travel is the moment you arrive in a foreign country, the American dollar will fall like a stone.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Country #Travel #Fall

Volunteers are the only human beings on the face of the earth who reflect this nation's compassion, unselfish caring, patience, and just plain love for one another.
-- Erma Bombeck

#4th Of July #Caring #Compassion

It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Dream #Lines #Uncommon

Myths that need clarification: "No matter how many times you see the Grand canyon, you are still emotionally moved to tears." False. It depends on how many children the out-of-towners brought with them who kicked the back of your seat from Phoenix to Flagstaff and got their gum caught in your hair.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Children #Phoenix #Hair

Shopping is a woman thing. It's a contact sport like football. Women enjoy the scrimmage, the noisy crowds, the danger of being trampled to death, and the ecstasy of the purchase.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Sports #Football #Shopping

Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Lazy #Literature #Housework

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Dream #Lonely #Clever

A friend doesn't go on a diet because you are fat.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Funny #Friendship #Laughter

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Thanksgiving #Sports #Food

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?
-- Erma Bombeck

#Food #Mean #Talking

A grandmother pretends she doesn't know who you are on Halloween.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Relationship #Fun #Halloween

Laughter rises out of tragedy when you need it the most, and rewards you for your courage.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Inspirational #Laughter #Humor

My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Family #Mom #Mother

One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child's name and how old he or she is.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Children #Funny Life #Hate

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

#Success #Determination #Greatness

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Funny #Witty #Humorous

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.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Sex #Giving Up #Women

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?
-- Erma Bombeck

#Funny #Block #Fire

It's frightening to wake up one morning and discover that while you were asleep you went out of style.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Morning #Style #Wake Up

A child needs your love most when he deserves it least
-- Erma Bombeck

#Children #Needs #Deserve

As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Children #Book #School

Car designers are just going to have to come up with an automobile that outlasts the payments.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Car #Designer #Come Up

Everyone I talked to was a recording-the bank, the elevator, your office, the school, a wrong number. You used to be able to call a wrong number and get a person.
-- Erma Bombeck

#School #Numbers #Office

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

#Inspirational #Funny #Travel

Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they're not trying to keep up with you.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Spiritual #Trying #Keep Trying

I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Clothes #Lucky #Realizing

Housework can kill you if done right.
-- Erma Bombeck

#Work #Drinking #Done

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

#Funny #Humorous #Food