Erma Bombeck Quotes

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.

All of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it.

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

When my kids become wild and unruly, I use a nice, safe playpen. When they're finished, I climb out.

Sometimes I can't figure designers out. It's as if they flunked human anatomy.

If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.

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?

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.

A grandmother pretends she doesn't know who you are on Halloween.

My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.

Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It's unbridled, its unplanned, it's full of suprises.

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

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.

Have you any idea how many children 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.

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. These are great dreams, but they 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.

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

In two decades I've lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.

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 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.

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.

Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery.

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

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

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.

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.

Don't confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.

It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows

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?

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.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

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

It seemed rather incongruous that in a society of super sophisticated communication, we often suffer from a shortage of listeners.

A friend doesn't go on a diet because you are fat.

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've exercised with women so thin that buzzards followed them to their cars.

We've got a generation now who were born with semiequality. They don't know how it was before, so they think, this isn't too bad. We're working. We have our attache' cases and our three piece suits. I get very disgusted with the younger generation of women. We had a torch to pass, and they are just sitting there. They don't realize it can be taken away. Things are going to have to get worse before they join in fighting the battle.

Anybody who watches three games of football in a row should be declared brain dead

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

Never order food in excess of your body weight.

What's with you men? Would hair stop growing on your chest if you asked directions somewhere?

The grass is always greener over the septic tank.

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

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

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

The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.

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

You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren't dying. They're merging into big conglomerates.

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 bottle of gin.