Erma bombeck quotes

Never underestimate what it takes to watch someone you love in pain.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Encourage independence in your children by regularly losing them in the supermarket.

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.

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.

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.

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

A grandparent will help you with your buttons, your zippers, and your shoelaces and not be in any hurry for you to grow up.

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

No baby shall at any time be quartered in a house where there are no soft laps, no laughter, or no love.

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.

Maybe age is kinder to us than we think. With my bad eyes, I can't see how bad I look, and with my rotten memory, I have a good excuse for getting out of a lot of stuff.

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

Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It's gossip.

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

It is my theory you can't get rid of fat. All you can do is move it around, like furniture.

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.

The grass is always greener over the septic tank.

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.

Housework can kill you if done right.

Housework, if it is done properly, can cause brain damage.

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

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

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

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

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.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

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?

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

People usually survive their illnesses, but the paper work eventually does them in. Filing a claim for insurance is terminal.

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.

Given another shot at life, I would seize every minute...look at it and really see it... live it...and never give it back. Stop sweating the small stuff. Don't worry about who doesn't like you, who has more, or who's doing what. Instead, let's cherish the relationships we have with those who do love us.

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.

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?

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.

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

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?

For the first two years of a child's life, we spend every waking hour tryibg to get the child to communicate. Then we spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out how we can reverse the process.

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

Every puppy should have a boy.

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.

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.

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

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

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.

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

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

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

. . . 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

To say, "Well, I write when I really get into it" is a bunch of bull. Put the paper in the typewriter, stare at it a long time, get snowblindness if you have to, but write something.

Most mothers entering the labor market outside the home are naive. They stagger home each evening, holding mail in their teeth, the cleaning over their arm, a lamb chop defrosting under each armpit, balancing two gallons of frozen milk between their knees, and expect one of the kids to get the door.

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

One never realizes how different a husband and wife can be until they begin to pack for a trip.

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.

When humor go's, there go's civilization.

Never have more children than you have car windows.

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 I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage.

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

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

There is so much to teach, and the time goes so fast.

Good kids are like sunsets. We take them for granted. Every evening they disappear. Most parents never imagine how hard they try to please us, and how miserable they feel when they think they have failed.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

A child needs your love most when he deserves it least

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

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

If the nest is truly empty, who owns all this junk?

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.

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'.

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

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

Children make your life important.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Pregnancy is the only time in a woman's life she can help God work a miracle.

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

When the going gets tough, the tough make cookies.

The term 'working mother' is redundant.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

He who laughs.....lasts.

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

Cats invented self-esteem.

Once you see the drivers in Indonesia you understand why religion plays such a part in their lives.

No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed.

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

I didn't fight my way to the top of the food chain to be a vegetarian.

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.

If I had my life to live over again, I would have waxed less and listened more. ... I would have cried and laughed less while watching television ... and more while watching real life. ... But mostly, given another shot at life, I would seize every minute of it ... look at it and really see it ... try it on ... live it ... exhaust it ... and never give the minute back until there was nothing left of it.

Never accept a drink from a urologist.

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.

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.

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.

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

Grandparenthood is one of life's rewards for surviving your own children.

Success is outliving your failures

Motherhood is the second oldest profession in the world. It never questions age, height, religious preference, health, political affiliation, citizenship, morality, ethnic background, marital status, economic level, convenience, or previous experience.