Top 100 Erma Bombeck Quotes
#1. A child develops individuality long before he develops taste.
Erma Bombeck
#3. House guests should be regarded as perishables: Leave them out too long and they go bad.
Erma Bombeck
#4. Maybe age is kinder to us than we think. With my bad eyes, I can't see how bad I look, and with my rotten memory, I have a good excuse for getting out of a lot of stuff.
Erma Bombeck
#5. 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
#6. One certainty when you travel is the moment you arrive in a foreign country, the American dollar will fall like a stone.
Erma Bombeck
#7. Having a delivery covered by Medicare just isn't going to fly. It's too risky for a woman to put a baby down and not remember where she left it.
Erma Bombeck
#8. Don't worry about who doesn't like you, who has more, or who's doing what.
Erma Bombeck
#9. 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
#10. I see children as kites. You spend a lifetime trying to get them off the ground. You run with them until you're both breathless. They crash ... you add a longer tail ... you patch and comfort, adjust and teach. You watch them lifted by the wind and assure them that someday they'll fly.
Erma Bombeck
#11. 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
#13. What does it profit a 78-year-old woman to sit around the pool in a bikini if she cannot feed herself?
Erma Bombeck
#14. Why take pride in cooking, when they don't take pride in eating?
Erma Bombeck
#15. Encourage independence in your children by regularly losing them in the supermarket.
Erma Bombeck
#16. Women are never what they seem to be. There is the woman you see and there is the woman who is hidden. Buy the gift for the woman who is hidden.
Erma Bombeck
#17. I became hysterical and frightened and begged for sedation. And that was just the first prenatal visit.
Erma Bombeck
#18. A friend doesn't go on a diet because you are fat.
Erma Bombeck
#19. Time. It hangs heavy for the bored, eludes the busy, flies by the for young, and runs out for the aged.
Erma Bombeck
#20. If compliments were food, I'd have starved to death 28 years ago.
Erma Bombeck
#21. Never be in a hurry to terminate a marriage. Remember, you may need this man/woman to finish a sentence.
Erma Bombeck
#22. Car designers are just going to have to come up with an automobile that outlasts the payments.
Erma Bombeck
#23. 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
#25. Babies should enjoy the freedom to vocalize whether it be in church, a public meeting place, during a movie, or after hours when the lights are out. They have not yet learned that joy and laughter have to last a lifetime and must be conserved.
Erma Bombeck
#26. Everyone I talked to was a recording-the bank, the elevator, your office, the school, a wrong number. You used to be able to call a wrong number and get a person.
Erma Bombeck
#27. I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.
Erma Bombeck
#28. Men who have a thirty-six-tele vised-football- games-a- week-habit should be declared legally dead and their estates probated.
Erma Bombeck
#29. There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.
Erma Bombeck
#30. 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
#31. I hated skiing or any other sport where there was an ambulance waiting at the bottom of the hill.
Erma Bombeck
#32. It would have been a wonderful wedding - had it not been mine.
Erma Bombeck
#33. Parenting is a negative thing. Keep your children from killing themselves, or anyone else, and hope for the best.
Erma Bombeck
#34. People are always asking couples whose marriage has endured at least a quarter of a century for their secret for success. Actually, it is no secret at all. I am a forgiving woman. Long ago, I forgave my husband for not being Paul Newman.
Erma Bombeck
#35. There is so much to teach, and the time goes so fast.
Erma Bombeck
#36. Housework, if it is done properly, can cause brain damage.
Erma Bombeck
#37. Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It's gossip
Erma Bombeck
#38. When you're lecturing teenagers and they begin to hum and leave the room, you can sense there is hostility.
Erma Bombeck
#39. Why would anyone steal a shopping cart? It's like stealing a two-year-old.
Erma Bombeck
#40. Phone are wonderful instruments, but I wouldn't want our daughter to marry one.
Erma Bombeck
#41. 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
#42. In two decades I've lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.
Erma Bombeck
#43. Friends are "annuals" that need seasonal nurturing to bear blossoms. Family is a "perennial" that comes up year after year, enduring the droughts of absence and neglect. There's a place in the garden for both of them.
Erma Bombeck
#44. There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.
Erma Bombeck
#45. I come from a home where gravy is a beverage.
Erma Bombeck
#46. Last year I gave seventy-four phone hours to soliciting baked goods for the Bake-A-Rama. I was named Top Call Girl by the League.
Erma Bombeck
#47. Remember, you can lead a fifty-seven-year-old body to motherhood, but you can't make it stay awake.
Erma Bombeck
#48. The grass is always greener over the septic tank.
Erma Bombeck
#49. Once you see the drivers in Indonesia you understand why religion plays such a part in their lives.
Erma Bombeck
#50. Good kids are like sunsets. We take them for granted.
Erma Bombeck
#51. It's [motherhood] the biggest on-the-job- training program in existence today.
Erma Bombeck
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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.
Erma Bombeck
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.
Erma Bombeck
#58. I have never understood, for example, how come a child can climb up on the roof, scale the TV antenna, and rescue the cat ... yet cannot walk down the hallway without grabbing both walls with his grubby hands for balance.
Erma Bombeck
#59. My son would walk to the refrigerator-freezer and fling both doors open and stand there until the hairs in his nose iced up. After surveying $200 worth of food in varying shapes and forms, he would declare loudly, 'There's nothing to eat!'
Erma Bombeck
#60. 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
#62. When you're an orthodox worrier, some days are worse than others.
Erma Bombeck
#63. It's frightening to wake up one morning and discover that while you were asleep you went out of style.
Erma Bombeck
#64. When you look like your passport photo, it's time to go home.
Erma Bombeck
#65. How come anything you buy will go on sale next week?
Erma Bombeck
#66. My mind works ... two boobs never get me a job.
Erma Bombeck
#67. Some of the best fiction writers got their start writing airline menus.
Erma Bombeck
#68. 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
#69. A child needs your love the most when he deserves it least.
Erma Bombeck
#70. The art of never making a mistake is crucial to motherhood. To be effective and to gain the respect she needs to function, a mother 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
#71. A grandparent is the only baby-sitter who doesn't charge more after midnight - or anything before midnight.
Erma Bombeck
#72. Let me put it this way. According to my girth, I should be a ninety-foot redwood.
Erma Bombeck
#73. Anybody who watches three games of football in a row should be declared brain dead.
Erma Bombeck
#75. It is difficult to single out one sport over another, but if I have to name one in my separation suit, it will undoubtedly be football.
Erma Bombeck
#76. Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.
Erma Bombeck
#78. Kids need love the most when they're acting most unlovable.
Erma Bombeck
#79. 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.
Erma Bombeck
#80. I just clipped 2 articles from a current magazine. One is a diet guaranteed to drop 5 pounds off my body in a weekend. The other is a recipe for a 6 minute pecan pie.
Erma Bombeck
#81. 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.
Erma Bombeck
#82. Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery.
Erma Bombeck
#83. I've always been intrigued with the variety of answers this generation will give their children who ask, "Where did I come from, Mommy?" They will range from "Number 176 vial in Buffalo, New York," to "You were defrosted."
Erma Bombeck
#84. A grandparent will accept your calls from anywhere, collect.
Erma Bombeck
#85. It was a bitter moment for us. We weren't two mature parents. We were just two kids playing grown-up. We still needed Mommy and Daddy's permission, blessings, and money to survive.
Erma Bombeck
#86. It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.
Erma Bombeck
#87. I was trampled to death by a man who believed his luggage would be the first piece off. If he were an experienced traveler, he would know that the first piece of luggage belongs to no one. It's just a dummy suitcase to give everyone hope.
Erma Bombeck
#88. In Russia, as I sat there day after day wearing headphones, listening to the interpreter struggle to make our words relevant, I wondered if we could establish meaningful rapport with a nation that had never seen raisins dance in dark glasses on TV ... never had a garage sale.
Erma Bombeck
#89. 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
#90. Giving birth is little more than a set of muscular contractions granting passage of a child. Then the mother is born.
Erma Bombeck
#91. 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
#92. The woman who says, 'My kids are all speaking to one another and they love us' is a psychopathic liar.
Erma Bombeck
#93. Shopping is a woman thing. It's a contact sport like football. Women enjoy the scrimmage, the noisy crowds, the danger of being trampled to death, and the ecstasy of the purchase.
Erma Bombeck
#94. I convinced him his luggage had gone to that big Bermuda Triangle in the sky.
Erma Bombeck
#95. With girls, everything looks great on the surface. But beware of drawers that won't open. They contain a three-month supply of dirty underwear, unwashed hose, and rubber bands with blobs of hair in them.
Erma Bombeck
#96. Early in my life I had made a pact with myself. I would never eat anything that moved when I cooked it, excited the dog, or inflated upon impact with my teeth.
Erma Bombeck
#97. When they told me I needed a mastectomy, I thought of the thousands of luncheons and dinners I had attended where they slapped a name tag on my left bosom. I always smiled and said, 'Now, what shall we name the other one?' That would no longer be a problem.
Erma Bombeck
#98. Grandma told me Mama was once caught by the Principal for writing in the front of her book, "In Case of Fire, Throw This in First." I have never had so much respect for Mama as the day I heard this.
Erma Bombeck
#99. People usually survive their illnesses, but the paper work eventually does them in. Filing a claim for insurance is terminal.
Erma Bombeck
#100. I have always felt cookbooks were fiction and the most beautiful words in the English language were 'room service.
Erma Bombeck
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