Erma Bombeck Quotes

After age twelve, birthdays should be as private as hernia surgery.

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.

I will buy any creme, cosmetic, or elixir from a woman with a European accent.

Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.

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

A child needs your love most when he deserves it least

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?"

the ultimate in longevity is the Christmas fruitcake. It is a cake made during the holidays with fruits that make it heavier than the stove it is cooked in.

I have a hat. It is graceful and feminine and give me a certain dignity, as if I were attending a state funeral or something. Someday I may get up enough courage to wear it, instead of carrying it.

Never loan your car to anyone to whom you've given birth.

Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it.

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.

Children make your life important.

Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.

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

It would have been a wonderful wedding - had it not been mine.

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

God created man, but I could do better.

It is fast approaching the point where I don't want tAdenauer to want the job.

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 you're lecturing teenagers and they begin to hum and leave the room, you can sense there is hostility.

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.

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.

For years, my husband and I have advocated separate vacations. But the kids keep finding us.

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

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

Family life got better and we got our car back - as soon as we put 'I love Mom' on the license plate.

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.

No self-respecting mother would run out of intimidations on the eve of a major holiday.

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.

Do I have to use my own money?

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.

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.

Housework can kill you if done right.

The more I think about it, the more there is to be said for the sloth. He sleeps fifteen to eighteen hours a day and is known to have taken forty-eight days to travel four miles. He hangs in the trees after he's dead. But he lives longer than the cheetah.

Just think of all those women on the Titanic who said, 'No thank you' to desert that night. And for what?!

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.

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 type of humor is almost pure identification. A housewife reads my column and says, 'But that's happened to ME! I know just what she's talking about!

I lost everything in the post-natal depression.

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.

A friend never defends a husband who gets his wife an electric skillet for her birthday.

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.

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

Phone are wonderful instruments, but I wouldn't want our daughter to marry one.

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

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

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