Erma Bombeck Quotes

There is nothing more miserable in the world than to arrive in paradise and look like your passport photo.

I lost everything in the post-natal depression.

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

Written on her tombstone: "I told you I was sick.

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

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.

Grandparenthood is one of life's rewards for surviving your own children.

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

What makes people laugh? . . . It's a happy marriage between a person who needs to laugh and someone who's got one to give.

When you leave them in the morning, they stick their nose in the door crack and stand there like a portrait until you turn the key eight hours later.

As a graduate of the Zsa Zsa Gabor School of Creative mathematics, I honestly do not know how old I am.

All of a sudden, I feel very old and very tired. Maybe when I get to California, the smog, brush fires, floods, and earthquakes will cheer me up.

I originate from a family where sauce is viewed as a refreshment.

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

I have seen my kid struggle into the kitchen in the morning with outfits that need only one accessory: an empty gin bottle.

Laugh now, cry later.

Never order food in excess of your body weight.

Most women put off entertaining until the kids are grown.

Once you see the drivers in Indonesia you understand why religion plays such a part in their lives.

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

Families aren't easy to join. They're like an exclusive country club where membership makes impossible demands and the dues for an outsider are exorbitant.

Know the difference between success and fame. Success is Mother Teresa. Fame is Madonna.

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

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

One son appears in stereo - a transistor in one ear and the phone in the other.

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

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

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.

Car designers are just going to have to come up with an automobile that outlasts the payments.

Time. It hangs heavy for the bored, eludes the busy, flies by the for young, and runs out for the aged.

Housework, if it is done properly, can cause brain damage.

Never accept a drink from a urologist.

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

I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security and too tired for an affair.

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.

I didn't fear old age. I was just becoming increasingly aware of the fact that the only people who said old age was beautiful were usually twenty-three years old.

I have a friend who lives by a three-word philosophy: Seize the Moment. Just possibly, she may be the wisest woman on this planet.

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

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

One certainty when you travel is the moment you arrive in a foreign country, the American dollar will fall like a stone.

There is only one thing harder in this world than forgiving. It's to ask forgiveness armed only with, 'I'm sorry'.

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.

Spend at least one Mother's Day with your respective mothers before you decide on marriage. If a man gives his mother a gift certificate for a flu shot, dump him.

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

... it's simply wrong to always order [kids] to stop that fighting. There are times when one child is simply defending his rights and damned well should be fighting.

A fitting room to me has always been like a confessional ... where my body and my contrition take up the entire room.

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.

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.

You become about as exciting as your food blender. The kids come in, look you in the eye, and ask if anybody's home.

Most children's first words are 'Mama' or 'Daddy.' Mine were, 'Do I have to use my own money?'