Top 100 Erma Quotes
#1. ('I'm going to be more assertive, if that's all right with you', as Erma Bombeck says), and
Stephen King
#2. I've always worried a lot. And frankly I'm good at it." The late Erma Bombeck, one of the funniest women ever.
Catherine Robertson
#3. As far as my memory being reliable, at the risk of sounding like some sort of gorgeous two-headed monster with the voices of Dave Barry and Erma Bombeck, I do think that women, like elephants, remember everything and love peanuts.
Julie Klausner
#4. Housework, if you do it right, will kill you. - Erma Bombeck
Lynn Kellan
#5. My father was an electrical engineer who worked at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh. When I was growing up, my mother wrote humor columns for the local paper. She was the Erma Bombeck of Murrysville, Pa.
Jason Kilar
#6. Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?
Erma Bombeck
#7. A child develops individuality long before he develops taste.
Erma Bombeck
#9. House guests should be regarded as perishables: Leave them out too long and they go bad.
Erma Bombeck
#10. Motherhood isn't just a series of contractions; it's a state of mind. From the moment we know life is inside us, we feel a responsibility to protect and defend that human being.
Erma Bombeck
#11. Someone once threw me a small, brown, hairy kiwi fruit, and I threw a wastebasket over it until it was dead.
Erma Bombeck
#12. 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
#13. For some of us, watching a miniseries that lasts longer than most marriages is not easy.
Erma Bombeck
#14. If I had my life to live over, instead of wishing away nine months of pregnancy, I'd have cherished ever moment and realized that the wonderment growing inside me was the only chance in life to assist God in a miracle.
Erma Bombeck
#15. You become about as exciting as your food blender. The kids come in, look you in the eye, and ask if anybody's home.
Erma Bombeck
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Our teen-agers withdrew to their bedrooms on their thirteenth birthday and didn't show themselves to us again until it was time to get married.
Erma Bombeck
#19. Authorities say brain cells may shrink, but they don't necessarily die. Frankly, I am cheered by the fact that something is shrinking. I'd be even more thrilled if what was shrinking affected my dress size, but you can't have everything.
Erma Bombeck
#20. It seemed rather incongruous that in a society of super sophisticated communication, we often suffer from a shortage of listeners.
Erma Bombeck
#21. My son did not show signs of a money deficiency until he opened his small fist in the nursery and found it was empty.
Erma Bombeck
#22. People shop for a bathing suit with more care than they do a husband or wife. The rules are the same. Look for something you'll feel comfortable wearing. Allow for room to grow.
Erma Bombeck
#23. I would have invited friends over to dinner even if the carpet was stained, or the sofa faded.
Erma Bombeck
#24. In general my children refuse to eat anything that hasn't danced in television.
Erma Bombeck
#25. 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.
Erma Bombeck
#26. Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they're not trying to keep up with you.
Erma Bombeck
#27. 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
#28. One certainty when you travel is the moment you arrive in a foreign country, the American dollar will fall like a stone.
Erma Bombeck
#29. There would have been more 'I love you's' and more, 'I'm sorry's'.
Erma Bombeck
#30. A grandparent will help you with your buttons, your zippers, and your shoelaces and not be in any hurry for you to grow up.
Erma Bombeck
#31. Babies on television never spit up on the Ultrasuede.
Erma Bombeck
#32. 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
#33. Don't worry about who doesn't like you, who has more, or who's doing what.
Erma Bombeck
#34. 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
#35. You show me a boy who brings a snake home to his mother and I'll show you an orphan.
Erma Bombeck
#36. A grandmother pretends she doesn't know who you are on Halloween.
Erma Bombeck
#37. Grandmas can shed the yoke of responsibility, relax and enjoy their grandchildren in a way that was not possible when they were raising their own children. And they can glow in the realisation that here is their seed of life that will harvest generations to come.
Erma Bombeck
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. I have seen my kid struggle into the kitchen in the morning with outfits that need only one accessory: an empty gin bottle.
Erma Bombeck
#42. To be honest, however, I will have to admit that I wrote this book for the original model - the one who was overkidsed, underpatienced, with four years of college and chapped hands all year around. I knew if I didn't follow Faith's advice and laugh a little at myself, then I would surely cry.
Erma Bombeck
#43. What does it profit a 78-year-old woman to sit around the pool in a bikini if she cannot feed herself?
Erma Bombeck
#44. [On her father's death:] I didn't know his leaving would hurt so much.
Erma Bombeck
#45. For years, my husband and I have advocated separate vacations. But the kids keep finding us.
Erma Bombeck
#46. Many people are intimidated by doctors ... People also feel stupid when they don't understand what a doctor's talking about the first time around, so they don't ask again. And let's be honest here, people. English is not a doctor's first language.
Erma Bombeck
#47. Why take pride in cooking, when they don't take pride in eating?
Erma Bombeck
#48. Encourage independence in your children by regularly losing them in the supermarket.
Erma Bombeck
#49. 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
#50. Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the 'Titanic' who waved off the dessert cart.
Erma Bombeck
#51. I became hysterical and frightened and begged for sedation. And that was just the first prenatal visit.
Erma Bombeck
#52. Most children's first words are 'Mama' or 'Daddy.' Mine were, 'Do I have to use my own money?'
Erma Bombeck
#53. A friend doesn't go on a diet because you are fat.
Erma Bombeck
#54. Time. It hangs heavy for the bored, eludes the busy, flies by the for young, and runs out for the aged.
Erma Bombeck
#55. Most women put off entertaining until the kids are grown.
Erma Bombeck
#56. Know the difference between success and fame. Success is Mother Teresa. Fame is Madonna.
Erma Bombeck
#57. If compliments were food, I'd have starved to death 28 years ago.
Erma Bombeck
#58. Never be in a hurry to terminate a marriage. Remember, you may need this man/woman to finish a sentence.
Erma Bombeck
#59. Some emotions don't make a lot of noise. It's hard to hear pride. Caring is real faint - like a heartbeat. And pure love - why, some days it's so quiet, you don't even know it's there ...
Erma Bombeck
#60. Car designers are just going to have to come up with an automobile that outlasts the payments.
Erma Bombeck
#61. 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
#62. Any mother with half a skull knows that when Daddy's little boy becomes Mommy's little boy, the kid is so wet he's treading water.
Erma Bombeck
#64. Before we sent kids to computer camps and told them they were having a good time, there was imagination among the human species.
Erma Bombeck
#65. A friend will tell you she saw your old boyfriend - and he's a priest.
Erma Bombeck
#66. 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
#67. Sometimes I can't figure designers out. It's as if they flunked human anatomy.
Erma Bombeck
#68. 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
#69. Poached eggs are good, poached animals are not.
Erma Bombeck
#70. Motherhood is the second oldest profession in the world. It never questions age, height, religious preference, health, political affiliation, citizenship, morality, ethnic background, marital status, economic level, convenience, or previous experience.
Erma Bombeck
#71. It is fast approaching the point where I don't want tAdenauer to want the job.
Erma Bombeck
#72. Explain to me how he [her son] can ride a bicycle, run, play ball, set up a camp, swing, fight a war, swim and race for eight hours ... and has to be driven to the garbage can.
Erma Bombeck
#73. Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It's too controversial.
Erma Bombeck
#74. My idea of 'roughing it' is when you have to have an extension for your electric blanket.
Erma Bombeck
#75. I firmly believe kids don't want your understanding. They want your trust, your compassion, your blinding love and your car keys, but you try to understand them and you're in big trouble.
Erma Bombeck
#76. I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.
Erma Bombeck
#78. Men who have a thirty-six-tele vised-football- games-a- week-habit should be declared legally dead and their estates probated.
Erma Bombeck
#79. There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.
Erma Bombeck
#80. Volunteers are the only human beings on the face of the earth who reflect this nation's compassion, unselfish caring, patience, and just plain love for one another.
Erma Bombeck
#81. To say, "Well, I write when I really get into it" is a bunch of bull. Put the paper in the typewriter, stare at it a long time, get snowblindness if you have to, but write something.
Erma Bombeck
#82. 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
#83. Next to hot chicken soup, a tattoo of an anchor on your chest, and penicillin, I consider a honeymoon one of the most overrated events in the world.
Erma Bombeck
#84. Insanity is hereditary. You can catch it from your kids.
Erma Bombeck
#85. The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.
Erma Bombeck
#86. Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It's unbridled, its unplanned, it's full of suprises.
Erma Bombeck
#87. I hated skiing or any other sport where there was an ambulance waiting at the bottom of the hill.
Erma Bombeck
#88. There are few things in this world more satisfying than having your son teach you how to play tennis, unless it is having a semi-truck run over your foot.
Erma Bombeck
#89. It would have been a wonderful wedding - had it not been mine.
Erma Bombeck
#90. Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.
Erma Bombeck
#91. The hippopotamus is a vegetarian and looks like a wall. Lions who eat only red meat are sleek and slim. Are nutritionists on the wrong track?
Erma Bombeck
#92. If I had my life to live over I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage.
Erma Bombeck
#93. I haven't trusted polls since I read that 62% of women had affairs during their lunch hour. I've never met a woman in my life who would give up lunch for sex.
Erma Bombeck
#94. Parenting is a negative thing. Keep your children from killing themselves, or anyone else, and hope for the best.
Erma Bombeck
#95. 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.
Erma Bombeck
#96. When the history of guilt is written, parents who refuse their children money will be right up there in the Top Ten.
Erma Bombeck
#97. 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.
Erma Bombeck
#98. 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
#99. Not all bears have their own television series. Some of them are unemployed wild animals.
Erma Bombeck
#100. The fact was I didn't want to look my age, but I didn't want to act the age I wanted to look either. I also wanted to grow old enough to understand that sentence.
Erma Bombeck
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