Erma Bombeck Quotes

Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It's gossip
Erma Bombeck
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 a while 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.
Erma Bombeck
I am not a glutton-I am an explorer of food.
Erma Bombeck
It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.
Erma Bombeck
It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.
Erma Bombeck
It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.
Erma Bombeck
My mother phones daily to ask "Did you just try to reach me?" When I reply no she adds "So if you're not too busy call me while I'm still alive " . . . and hangs up.
Erma Bombeck
What's with you men? Would hair stop growing on your chest if you asked directions somewhere?
Erma Bombeck
But 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
I've been on a constant diet for the last two decades. I've lost a total of 789 pounds. By all accounts I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.
Erma Bombeck
The family. We are a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste coveting one another's desserts hiding shampoo locking each other out of our rooms inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant loving laughing defending and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.
Erma Bombeck
You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren't dying. They're merging into big conglomerates.
Erma Bombeck
Never lend your car to someone you've given birth to.
Erma Bombeck
Family life got better and we got our car back - as soon as we put "I love Mom" on the license plate.
Erma Bombeck
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?
Erma Bombeck
It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.
Erma Bombeck
Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for go live with a car battery.
Erma Bombeck
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."
Erma Bombeck
One certainty when you travel is the moment you arrive in a foreign country the American dollar will fall like a stone.
Erma Bombeck
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
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
Laugh now, cry later.
Erma Bombeck
Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.
Erma Bombeck
Grandparenthood is one of life's rewards for surviving your own children.
Erma Bombeck
There was a time when the one singular thing that held a marriage together was the threat of getting the kids.
Erma Bombeck
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
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.
Erma Bombeck
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
I come from a home where gravy is a beverage.
Erma Bombeck
Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.
Erma Bombeck
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
Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the 'Titanic' who waved off the dessert cart.
Erma Bombeck
It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows
Erma Bombeck
In Russia, as I sat there day after day wearing headphones, listening to the interpreter struggle to make our words relevant, I wondered if we could establish meaningful rapport with a nation that had never seen raisins dance in dark glasses on TV...never had a garage sale.
Erma Bombeck
One never realizes how different a husband and wife can be until they begin to pack for a trip.
Erma Bombeck
Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.
Erma Bombeck
Don't worry about who doesn't like you, who has more, or who's doing what.
Erma Bombeck
Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?
Erma Bombeck
If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.
Erma Bombeck
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
Girls mature faster than boys, cost more to raise, and statistics show that the old saw about girls not knowing about money and figures is a myth. Girls start to outspend boys before puberty—and they manage to maintain this lead until death or an ugly credit manager, whichever comes first. Males are born with a closed fist. Girls are born with the left hand cramped in a position the size of an American Express card. Whenever a girl sees a sign reading, “Sale, Going Out of Business, Liquidation,” saliva begins to form in her mouth, the palms of her hands perspire and the pituitary gland says, “Go, Mama.” In the male, it is quite a different story. He has a gland that follows a muscle from the right arm down to the base of his billfold pocket. It's called “cheap.” Girls can slam a door louder, beg longer, turn tears on and off like a faucet, and invented the term, “You don't trust me.” So much for “sugar and spice and everything nice” and “snips and snails and puppydog tails.
Erma Bombeck
I have seen my kid struggle into the kitchen in the morning with outfits that need only one accessory: an empty gin bottle.
Erma Bombeck
All of us have moments in out lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.
Erma Bombeck
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
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.
Erma Bombeck
Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery.
Erma Bombeck
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
It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.
Erma Bombeck
A friend doesn't go on a diet because you are fat.
Erma Bombeck
A friend doesn't go on a diet because you are fat.
Erma Bombeck
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
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.
Erma Bombeck
Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.
Erma Bombeck
When humor goes, there goes civilization.
Erma Bombeck
A grandmother pretends she doesn't know who you are on Halloween.
Erma Bombeck
Laughter rises out of tragedy when you need it the most, and rewards you for your courage.
Erma Bombeck
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
Written on her tombstone: "I told you I was sick.
Erma Bombeck
Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It's unbridled, its unplanned, it's full of suprises.
Erma Bombeck
Sometimes I can't figure designers out. It's as if they flunked human anatomy.
Erma Bombeck