Erma Bombeck Quotes

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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 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.”

“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!'”

“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.”

“Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.”

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

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

“I was trampled to death by a man who believed his luggage would be the first piece off. If he were an experienced traveler, he would know that the first piece of luggage belongs to no one. It's just a dummy suitcase to give everyone hope.”

“Car designers are just going to have to come up with an automobile that outlasts the payments.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.”

“When you leave them in the morning, they stick their nose in the door crack and stand there like a portrait until you turn the key eight hours later.”

“When it comes to cooking, five years ago I felt guilty "just adding water." Now I want to bang the tube against the countertop and have a five-course meal pop out. If it comes with plastic silverware and a plate that self-destructs, all the better.”

“Written on her tombstone: "I told you I was sick.”

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

“I don't think women outlive men, Doctor. It only seems longer.”

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