“Don’t confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.”
― 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
“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
“Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the ‘Titanic’ who waved off the dessert cart.”
― Erma Bombeck
“When your mother asks, “Do you want a piece of advice?” it’s a mere formality. It doesn’t matter if you answer yes or no. You’re going to get it anyway.”
― Erma Bombeck
“There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.”
― Erma Bombeck
“It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.”
― Erma Bombeck
“I am not a glutton – I am an explorer of food”
― Erma Bombeck
“Worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere”
― Erma Bombeck
“There’s nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.”
― Erma Bombeck
“Don’t worry about who doesn’t like you, who has more, or who’s doing what.”
― Erma Bombeck
“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.”
― Erma Bombeck
“Housework can kill you if done right.”
― Erma Bombeck
“Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?”
― 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
“All of us have moments in out lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them. ”
― 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
“Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.”
― erma bombeck
“Cleanliness is not next to godliness. It isn’t even in the same neighborhood. No one has ever gotten a religious experience out of removing burned-on cheese from the grill of the toaster oven.”
― 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
“Sometimes I can’t figure designers out. It’s as if they flunked human anatomy.”
― Erma Bombeck
“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.”
― Erma Bombeck
“When humor goes, there goes civilization.”
― Erma Bombeck
“If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.”
― Erma Bombeck
“Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.”
― Erma Bombeck
“Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.”
― 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
“A grandmother pretends she doesn’t know who you are on Halloween.”
― Erma Bombeck
“If you can’t make it better, you can laugh at it.”
― Erma Bombeck
“Written on her tombstone: “I told you I was sick.”
― 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
“Just think of all those women on the Titanic who said, ‘No thank you’ to desert that night. And for what?!”
― Erma Bombeck
“Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It’s unbridled, its unplanned, it’s full of suprises.”
― Erma Bombeck
“I love my mother for all the times she said absolutely nothing…. Thinking back on it all, it must have been the most difficult part of mothering she ever had to do: knowing the outcome, yet feeling she had no right to keep me from charting my own path. I thank her for all her virtues, but mostly for never once having said, “I told you so.”
― Erma Bombeck
“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, 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.”
― Erma Bombeck
“As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.”
― Erma Bombeck
“Laughter rises out of tragedy when you need it the most, and rewards you for your courage.”
― Erma Bombeck
“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.”
― Erma Bombeck
“Laugh now, cry later.”
― Erma Bombeck
“Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter productivity.”
― Erma Bombeck
“In two decades I’ve lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.”
― 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
“A child needs your love most when he deserves it least”
― Erma Bombeck
“When my kids become wild and unruly, I use a nice, safe playpen. When they’re finished, I climb out.”
― Erma Bombeck
“I come from a home where gravy is a beverage.”
― 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. 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.”
― 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
“Insanity is hereditary. You can catch it from your kids.”
― Erma Bombeck
“…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.”
― Erma Bombeck
“Marriage has no guarantees. If that’s what you’re looking for, go live with a car battery.”
― 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