Erma Bombeck
Full Name: Erma Louise Bombeck
Birthdate: February 21, 1927
Birthplace: Dayton, Ohio, USA
Date of Death: April 22, 1996
Occupation: Author, Columnist, and Humorist
Profile: Best known for
The Grass is Always Greener.
Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erma_bombeck
Number of Quotes: 114
A child develops individuality long before he develops taste. I have seen my kid straggle into
the kitchen in the morning with outfits that need only one accessory: an empty gin bottle.
A child needs your love most when he's acting most unlovable.
A friend doesn't go on a diet because you are fat.
A friend never defends a husband who gets his wife an electric skillet for her birthday.
A friend will tell you she saw your old boyfriend - and he's a priest.
A grandmother pretends she doesn't know who you are on Halloween.
All of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with white carpet is one of them.
Anybody who watches three games of football in a row should be declared brain dead.
Becoming a grandmother is wonderful. One moment you’re just a mother. The next you are all-wise and prehistoric.
Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they're not trying to keep up with you.
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.
Car designers are just going to have to come up with an automobile that outlasts the payments.
Car pools are mothers who, when they have nothing else to do, provide transportation for a pack of kids they’d never allow in their own house.
Children make your life important.
Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.
Cleanliness is not next to godliness. It isn't even in the same neighborhood.
Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?
Do you know what you call those who use towels and never wash them, eat meals and never do the dishes, sit in rooms they never clean, and
are entertained till they drop? If you have just answered, A house guest,
you're wrong because I have just described my kids.
Don't confuse fame with success. Madonna
is one; Helen Keller is the other.
Don't worry about who doesn't like you, who has more, or who's doing what.
Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.
Exercise? I thought you had to be sick for that? I get my exercise being a pallbearer for my friends who exercise.
Experience is a great teacher. I have a stretch mark who sits in the back and never shuts up.
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, 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.
For some of us, watching a miniseries that lasts longer than most marriages is not easy.
For years my wedding ring has done its job. It has led me not into temptation. It has reminded my husband numerous times at parties
that it's time to go home. It has been a source of relief to a dinner companion. It has been a status symbol in the maternity ward.
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.
God created man, but I could do better.
Grandchildren are God's way of compensating us for growing old.
Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.
House guests should be regarded as perishables: Leave them out too long and they go bad.
Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.
Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter-productivity.
How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?
How come anything you buy will go on sale next week?
Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It's unbridled, it's unplanned, it's full of surprises.
Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.
I always had a dream that when I am asked to give the meaning of life, I could look it up in the Yellow Pages.
I am not a glutton - I am an explorer of food.
I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.
I don't know how you feel about old age... but in my case I didn't even see it coming. It hit me from the rear.
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.
I have a theory about the human mind. A brain is a lot like a computer. It will only take so many facts, and then it will go on overload and blow up.
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.
I lost my parents at an early age... the police found them.
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.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: Checkout Time is 18 years.
I think a man can have two, maybe three, love affairs while he's married. After that, it's cheating.
I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.
I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security and too tired for an affair.
I will buy any creme, cosmetic, or elixir from a woman with a European accent.
I've exercised with women so thin that buzzards followed them to their cars.
If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.
If I had my life to live over I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage.
If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it.
If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Or, in my case, if you can't stand the dirt, get out of the house.
In general my children refuse to eat anything that hasn't danced in television.
In two decades I've lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.
It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.
It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.
It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.
Laughter rises out of tragedy, when you need it the most, and rewards you for your courage.
Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It's too controversial.
Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery.
Most women put off entertaining until the kids are grown.
My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.
My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.
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?
Never accept a drink from a urologist.
Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
Never go to your high school reunion pregnant or they will think that is all you have done since you graduated.
Never have more children than you have car windows.
Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.
Never order food in excess of your body weight.
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.
On vacations: 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.
One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at
the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child's name and how old he or she is.
Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The
Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I'm taking with me when I go.
Onion rings in the car cushions do not improve with time.
People shop for a bathing suit with more care than they do a husband or wife. The rules
are the same. Look for something you'll feel comfortable wearing. Allow for room to grow.
Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the Titanic
who waved off the dessert cart.
Some of our ancestors have a lot to answer for. On the other hand, I'd hate to think what my descendants will say about me.
Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It's gossip.
Someone once threw me a small, brown, hairy kiwi fruit, and I threw a wastebasket over it until it was dead.
Sometimes I can't figure designers out. It's as if they flunked human anatomy.
Somewhere it is written that parents who are critical of other people's children and publicly admit they can do better are asking for it.
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.
Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.
The easiest way to teach children the value of money is to borrow from them.
The family. We were 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...
The grass is always greener over the septic tank.
The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.
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.
There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.
There is nothing more miserable in the world than to arrive in paradise and look like your passport photo.
There is one thing I have never taught my body how to do and that is to figure out at 6 A.M. what it wants to eat at 6 P.M.
There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.
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.
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
What's with you men? Would hair stop growing on your chest if you asked directions somewhere?
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.
When humor goes, there goes civilization.
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.
When my kids become wild and unruly, I use a nice, safe playpen. When they're finished, I climb out.
When you look like your passport photo, it's time to go home.
When your mother asks, Do you want a piece of advice?
it is a mere
formality. It doesn't matter if you answer yes or no. You're going to get it anyway.
Who in their infinite wisdom decreed that Little League uniforms be white? Certainly not a mother.
Why would anyone steal a shopping cart? It's like stealing a two-year-old.
Worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere.
You become a professional writer the moment you put the first word on paper. You don’t need an agent, a contract, or a publisher to tell you that.
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.
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.
Last on Earth
