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Quotes by Erma Bombeck

A friend doesn't go on a diet because you are fat.
– Erma Bombeck
A friend never defends a husband who gets his wife an electric skillet for her birthday.
– Erma Bombeck
A friend will tell you she saw your old boyfriend-and he's a priest.
– Erma Bombeck
Anybody who watches three games of football in a row should be declared brain dead.
– Erma Bombeck
Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they're not trying to keep up with you.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
Car designers are just going to have to come up with an automobile that outlasts the payments.
– Erma Bombeck
Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
Don't confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.
– Erma Bombeck
Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.
– Erma Bombeck
Education is so important when it comes to domesticity. 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.
– Erma Bombeck
Everyone is guilty at one time or another of throwing out questions that beg to be ignored, but mothers seem to have a market on the supply. Do you want a spanking or do you want to go to bed? Don't you want to save some of the pizza for your brother? Wasn't there any change?
– Erma Bombeck
For some of us, watching a miniseries that lasts longer than most marriages is not easy.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
God created man, but I could do better.
– Erma Bombeck
Graduation day is tough for adults. They go to the ceremony as parents. They come home as contemporaries. After twenty-two years of child-raising, they are unemployed.
– Erma Bombeck
Great dreams... never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say, How good or how bad am I? That's where courage comes in.
– Erma Bombeck
Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.
– Erma Bombeck
Have you any idea how many kids 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.
– Erma Bombeck
House guests should be regarded as perishables: Leave them out too long and they go bad.
– Erma Bombeck
Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter productivity.
– Erma Bombeck
Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.
– Erma Bombeck
How come anything you buy will go on sale next week?
– Erma Bombeck
Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It's unbridled, it's unplanned, it's full of surprises.
– Erma Bombeck
I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security and too tired for an affair.
– Erma Bombeck
I will buy any creme, cosmetic, or elixir from a woman with a European accent.
– Erma Bombeck
I'm going to stop punishing my children by saying, Never mind! I'll do it myself.
– Erma Bombeck
I'm trying very hard to understand this generation. They have adjusted the timetable for childbearing so that menopause and teaching a sixteen-year-old how to drive a car will occur in the same week.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
I've exercised with women so thin that buzzards followed them to their cars.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it.
– Erma Bombeck
In general my children refuse to eat anything that hasn't danced in television.
– Erma Bombeck
In two decades I've lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.
– Erma Bombeck
It is ludicrous to read the microwave direction on the boxes of food you buy, as each one will have a disclaimer: THIS WILL VARY WITH YOUR MICROWAVE. Loosely translated, this means, You're on your own, Bernice.
– Erma Bombeck
It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.
– Erma Bombeck
Just think of all those women on the Titanic who said, No, thank you, to dessert that night. And for what!
– Erma Bombeck
Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It's too controversial.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery.
– Erma Bombeck
Most women put off entertaining until the kids are grown.
– Erma Bombeck
Mother's words of wisdom: Answer me! Don't talk with food in your mouth!
– Erma Bombeck
My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.
– Erma Bombeck
My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.
– Erma Bombeck
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?
– Erma Bombeck
Myths that need clarification: Everyone in California lives on a white, sandy beach. False. The only people who live on California beaches are vacationers from Arizona, Utah, and Nevada who own condos.
– Erma Bombeck
Myths that need clarification: No matter how many times you see the Grand canyon, you are still emotionally moved to tears. False. It depends on how many children the out-of-towners brought with them who kicked the back of your seat from Phoenix to Flagstaff and got their gum caught in your hair.
– Erma Bombeck
Never accept a drink from a urologist.
– Erma Bombeck
Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
– Erma Bombeck
Never go to your high school reunion pregnant or they will think that is all you have done since you graduated.
– Erma Bombeck
Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.
– Erma Bombeck
Never order food in excess of your body weight.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
No self-respecting mother would run out of intimidations on the eve of a major holiday.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
Onion rings in the car cushions do not improve with time.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
Phrases and their actual meanings: My teacher has never liked me. Expect a phone call before lunch from the teacher informing you that your child has been launching hot dogs by compressing them inside a small Thermos and then removing the lid quickly.
– Erma Bombeck
Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It's gossip.
– Erma Bombeck
Someone once threw me a small, brown, hairy kiwi fruit, and I threw a wastebasket over it until it was dead.
– Erma Bombeck
Sometimes I can't figure designers out. It's as if they flunked human anatomy.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.
– Erma Bombeck
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?
– Erma Bombeck
The art of never making a mistake is crucial to motherhood. To be effective and to gain the respect she needs to function, a other 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.
– Erma Bombeck
The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.
– Erma Bombeck
There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, Yes, I've got dreams, of course I've got dreams. Then they put the box away and bring it out once in awhile to look in it, and yep, they're still there.
– Erma Bombeck
There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.
– Erma Bombeck
There is nothing more miserable in the world than to arrive in paradise and look like your passport photo.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
What's with you men? Would hair stop growing on your chest if you asked directions somewhere?
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
When humor goes, there goes civilization.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
Who in their infinite wisdom decreed that Little League uniforms be white? Certainly not a mother.
– Erma Bombeck
Why would anyone steal a shopping cart? It's like stealing a two-year-old.
– Erma Bombeck
You become about as exciting as your food blender. The kids come in, look you in the eye, and ask if anybody's home.
– Erma Bombeck
You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren't dying. They're merging into big conglomerates.
– Erma Bombeck
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.
– Erma Bombeck
What we're really talking about is a wonderful day set aside on the fourth Thursday of November when no one diets. I mean, why else would they call it Thanksgiving?
– Erma Bombeck
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!'…Basically women work alone when they're at home. They think no one is feeling what they are feeling, that no one understands their daily frustrations. But we do; we all do.
– Erma Bombeck
It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.
– Erma Bombeck
I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: 'Checkout Time is 18 years.'
– Erma Bombeck
Children make your life important.
– Erma Bombeck