Erma Bombeck Quotes (119 Quotes)

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

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.

Someone once threw me a small, brown, hairy kiwi fruit, and I threw a wastebasket over it until it was dead.

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

Never have more children than you have car windows.

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

When you're an orthodox worrier, some days are worse than others

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.

Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they're not trying to keep up with you.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Why would anyone steal a shopping cart? It's like stealing a two-year-old.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

For some of us, watching a miniseries that lasts longer than most marriages is not easy.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

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.

At some point in your life if you're lucky you throw practicality to the wind andstart living.

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.

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.

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.

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

House guests should be regarded as perishables: Leave them out too long and they go bad.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

How come anything you buy will go on sale next week?

My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.

Children make your life important.

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.

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

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

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