Erma Bombeck Quotes

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

“I'm on a diet as my skin doesn't fit me anymore.”

“The age of your children is a key factor in how quickly you are served in a restaurant. We once had a waiter in Canada who said, "Could I get you your check?" and we answered, "How about the menu first?"”

“I don't know when pepper mills in a restaurant got to be right behind frankincense and myrrh in prominence. It used to be in a little jar that sat next to the salt on the table and everyone passed it around, sneezed, and it was no big deal.”

“Do I have to use my own money?”

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

“Laugh now, cry later.”

“Those magazine dieting stories always have the testimonial of a woman who wore a dress that could slipcover New Jersey in one photo and thirty days later looked like a well-dressed thermometer.”

“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.”

“All of a sudden, I feel very old and very tired. Maybe when I get to California, the smog, brush fires, floods, and earthquakes will cheer me up.”

“I was leafing through a magazine where there was a before-and-after picture of a woman who went from a size 5 to a size 3 by liposuction. Was she serious? I've cooked bigger turkeys than her "before" picture.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“The bad times I can handle. It's the good times that drive me crazy. When is the other shoe going going to drop?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Explain to me how he [her son] can ride a bicycle, run, play ball, set up a camp, swing, fight a war, swim and race for eight hours ... and has to be driven to the garbage can.”

“Never order food in excess of your body weight.”

“Who in their infinite wisdom decreed that Little League uniforms be white? Certainly not a mother.”

“The woman who says, 'My kids are all speaking to one another and they love us' is a psychopathic liar.”