Erma Bombeck Quotes

In all honesty, men changed a few rules when they became what was referred to as househusbands. Bill didn't make beds, cook, dust, do laundry, windows or floors, or give birth. What he did do was pay bills, call people to fix the plumbing, handle the investments and taxes, volunteer big time, take papers to the garage, change license plates, get the cars serviced, and pick up the cleaning. If women had had that kind of schedule, who knows, we'd probably still be in the home.

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.

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

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

Never be in a hurry to terminate a marriage. Remember, you may need this man/woman to finish a sentence.

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.

Crocodiles have a smile I've seen on the face of every lawyer I've ever met.

Early in my life I had made a pact with myself. I would never eat anything that moved when I cooked it, excited the dog, or inflated upon impact with my teeth.

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

I never go to a college reunion that I don't come away feeling sorry for all those paunchy, balding jocks trying to hang onto youth. I feel sorry for the men, too.

I'm going to stop punishing my children by saying, Never mind! I'll do it myself.

For from this day forward his world can only widen. An existence that began in a crib, grew to a house, and extends over a two-block bicycle ride will now go even beyond that. I will share him with another woman, other adults, other children, other opinions, other points of view. I am no longer leading. I am standing behind him ready to guide from a new position.

Sometimes I can't figure designers out. It's as if they flunked human anatomy.

When a man's got cream in the refrigerator at home, he won't go out looking for two-percent butterfat.

I have always felt cookbooks were fiction and the most beautiful words in the English language were 'room service.

I want to teach you so much that you must know to find happiness within yourself. Yet I don't know where to begin or how. I want you to be a square. That's right, a square! I want you to kiss your grandmother when you walk into the room even if you're with friends ... I want you to lend dignity to the things you believe in and respect for the things you don't believe in. I want you to be a human begin who needs friends, and in turn deserves them. I want you to be a square who polishes his shoes, buttons the top button of his shirt occasionally, and stands straight and looks people in the eye when they are talking to you. There is a time to laugh and a time to cry. I want you to know the difference.

The Rose Bowl is the only bowl I've ever seen that I didn't have to clean.

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

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.

For some of us, watching a miniseries that lasts longer than most marriages is not easy.

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.

It would have been a wonderful wedding - had it not been mine.

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.

Not all bears have their own television series. Some of them are unemployed wild animals.

Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It's unbridled, its unplanned, it's full of suprises.

With boys, you always know where you stand. Right in the path of a hurricane.

I became hysterical and frightened and begged for sedation. And that was just the first prenatal visit.

I have finally mastered what to do with the second tennis ball. Having small hands, I was becoming terribly self-conscious about keeping it in a can in the car while I served the first one. I noted some women tucked the second ball just inside the elastic leg of their tennis panties. I tried, but found the space already occupied by a leg. Now, I simply drop the second ball down my cleavage, giving me a chest that often stuns my opponent throughout an entire set.

Parenting is a negative thing. Keep your children from killing themselves, or anyone else, and hope for the best.

I was a closet pacifier advocate. So were most of my friends. Unknown to our mothers, we owned thirty or forty of those little suckers that were placed strategically around the house so a cry could be silenced in less than thirty seconds. Even though bottles were boiled, rooms disinfected, and germs fought one on one, no one seemed to care where the pacifier had been.

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

You show me a boy who brings a snake home to his mother and I'll show you an orphan.

Never accept a drink from a urologist.

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.

Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.

When a child is locked in the bathroom with water running and he says he's doing nothing but the dog is barking, call 911.

People are always asking couples whose marriage has endured at least a quarter of a century for their secret for success. Actually, it is no secret at all. I am a forgiving woman. Long ago, I forgave my husband for not being Paul Newman.

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.

To my way of thinking, the American family started to decline when parents began to communicate with their children.

I have seen my kid struggle into the kitchen in the morning with outfits that need only one accessory: an empty gin bottle.

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?

Babies should enjoy the freedom to vocalize whether it be in church, a public meeting place, during a movie, or after hours when the lights are out. They have not yet learned that joy and laughter have to last a lifetime and must be conserved.

Any mother with half a skull knows that when Daddy's little boy becomes Mommy's little boy, the kid is so wet he's treading water.

Laugh now, cry later.

Time. It hangs heavy for the bored, eludes the busy, flies by the for young, and runs out for the aged.

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

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.

I would have invited friends over to dinner even if the carpet was stained, or the sofa faded.

I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security and too tired for an affair.

Most children's first words are 'Mama' or 'Daddy.' Mine were, 'Do I have to use my own money?'

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, 'Yes, I've got dreams, of course I've got dreams.' Then they put the box away and bring it out once in awhile to look in it, and yep, they're still there. These are great dreams, but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say, 'How good or how bad am I?' That's where courage comes in.

It's simply wrong to always order [kids] to stop that fighting. There are times when one child is simply defending his rights and damned well should be fighting.

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

How come anything you buy will go on sale next week?

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.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

My son did not show signs of a money deficiency until he opened his small fist in the nursery and found it was empty.

Kids need love the most when they're acting most unlovable.

I worry about scientists discovering that lettuce has been fattening all along.

Women are never what they seem to be. There is the woman you see and there is the woman who is hidden. Buy the gift for the woman who is hidden.

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?

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

A child develops individuality long before he develops taste.

If anyone knew where they were, I'd send the ISDBB (Incredibly Stupid and Dumb Beyond Belief) award to the two guys who tried to break in to the Ohio penitentiary.

Last year I gave seventy-four phone hours to soliciting baked goods for the Bake-A-Rama. I was named Top Call Girl by the League.

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.

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

Let us hope manufacturers can come up with a diaper that is environmentally sound. To go back to cloth would send us back to the day when breathing and raising a baby at the same time were incompatible.

I've always felt there are two things a woman should never do after the age of thirty-five: stand in natural light and have a baby ...

As a graduate of the Zsa Zsa Gabor School of Creative mathematics, I honestly do not know how old I am.

Many people are intimidated by doctors ... People also feel stupid when they don't understand what a doctor's talking about the first time around, so they don't ask again. And let's be honest here, people. English is not a doctor's first language.

I have paid as much as $300 a night to throw up into a sink shaped like a seashell.

A fitting room to me has always been like a confessional ... where my body and my contrition take up the entire room.

The mole rat is the only rodent born without a fur coat. With a good lawyer, someone would pay for that little oversight.

There was a time when the one singular thing that held a marriage together was the threat of getting the kids.

Success is outliving your failures

Let me put it this way. According to my girth, I should be a ninety-foot redwood.

When you're an orthodox worrier, some days are worse than others.

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.

My son would walk to the refrigerator-freezer and fling both doors open and stand there until the hairs in his nose iced up. After surveying $200 worth of food in varying shapes and forms, he would declare loudly, 'There's nothing to eat!'

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.

Authorities say brain cells may shrink, but they don't necessarily die. Frankly, I am cheered by the fact that something is shrinking. I'd be even more thrilled if what was shrinking affected my dress size, but you can't have everything.

The hippopotamus is a vegetarian and looks like a wall. Lions who eat only red meat are sleek and slim. Are nutritionists on the wrong track?

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

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

I have a hat. It is graceful and feminine and give me a certain dignity, as if I were attending a state funeral or something. Someday I may get up enough courage to wear it, instead of carrying it.

I got so much food spit back in my face when my kids were small, I put windshield wipers on my glasses.

After age twelve, birthdays should be as private as hernia surgery.

A grandparent is the only baby-sitter who doesn't charge more after midnight - or anything before midnight.

Sex in the nineties is boring. The problem is that it has gone from an active act to a spectator sport. We watch people make love on television and in films. We call 900 numbers to hear what someone would do to us if they weren't sitting in a boiler room of other dirty talkers reading from a prepared script.

There was a time when the respect and trust my children had for me would have made you sick to your stomach. They believed I could blow on a red traffic light and turn it green.

What's with you men? Would hair stop growing on your chest if you asked directions somewhere?

I am always behind the shopper at the grocery store who has stitched her coupons in the lining of her coat and wants to talk about a 'strong' chicken she bought two weeks ago. The register tape also runs out just before her sub-total. In the public restroom, I always stand behind the teen-ager who is changing into her band uniform for a parade and doesn't emerge until she has combed the tassels on her boots, shaved her legs, and recovered her contact lens from the commode.

Children make your life important.

I convinced him his luggage had gone to that big Bermuda Triangle in the sky.

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.

When God Created Mothers"

When the Good Lord was creating mothers, He was into His sixth day of "overtime" when the angel appeared and said. "You're doing a lot of fiddling around on this one."

And God said, "Have you read the specs on this order?" She has to be completely washable, but not plastic. Have 180 moveable parts...all replaceable. Run on black coffee and leftovers. Have a lap that disappears when she stands up. A kiss that can cure anything from a broken leg to a disappointed love affair. And six pairs of hands."

The angel shook her head slowly and said. "Six pairs of hands.... no way."

It's not the hands that are causing me problems," God remarked, "it's the three pairs of eyes that mothers have to have."

That's on the standard model?" asked the angel. God nodded.

One pair that sees through closed doors when she asks, 'What are you kids doing in there?' when she already knows. Another here in the back of her head that sees what she shouldn't but what she has to know, and of course the ones here in front that can look at a child when he goofs up and say. 'I understand and I love you' without so much as uttering a word."

God," said the angel touching his sleeve gently, "Get some rest tomorrow...."

I can't," said God, "I'm so close to creating something so close to myself. Already I have one who heals herself when she is sick...can feed a family of six on one pound of hamb

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

With all the precautions and risks that accompany sex today, it sounds about as much fun as walking through a minefield.