Erma Bombeck Quotes

“A small waist makes you tire easily.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“. . . 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.”

“Never accept a drink from a urologist.”

“A child develops individuality long before he develops taste.”

“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 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.”

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

“Why would anyone steal a shopping cart? It's like stealing a two-year-old.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I've decided life is too fragile to finish a book I dislike just because it cost $16.95 and everyone else loved it. Or eat a fried egg with a broken yolk (which I hate) when the dog would leap over the St. Louis Arch for it.”

“I learned the importance of a man's chair early in life. I learned that he may love several wives, embrace several cars, be true to more than one political philosophy, and be equally committed to several careers, but he will have only one comfortable chair in his life. I learned it will be an ugly chair. It will match nothing in the entire house. It will never wear out.”

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

“If I raised my hand to wipe the hair out of my children's eyes, they'd flinch and call their attorney.”

“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've never vied for power in the family before. Pointing a box at the garage door and saying "Open!" was never a big deal, but holding that television tuner and realizing I alone control what is flashed on the screen brings out the Iacocca in me.”

“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.”

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

“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.”