Erma Bombeck Quotes

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.

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'.

Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the 'Titanic' who waved off the dessert cart.

Given another shot at life, I would seize every minute...look at it and really see it... live it...and never give it back. Stop sweating the small stuff. Don't worry about who doesn't like you, who has more, or who's doing what. Instead, let's cherish the relationships we have with those who do love us.

My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.

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.

Someday, when my children are old enough to understand the logic that motivates a mother, I'll tell them: I loved you enough to bug you about where you were going, with whom and what time you would get home. ... I loved you enough to be silent and let you discover your friend was a creep. I loved you enough to make you return a Milky Way with a bite out of it to a drugstore and confess, 'I stole this.' ... But most of all I loved you enough to say no when you hated me for it. That was the hardest part of all.

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

When my kids become wild and unruly, I use a nice, safe playpen. When they're finished, I climb out.

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.

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

Kids need love the most when they're acting most unlovable.

I didn't fight my way to the top of the food chain to be a vegetarian.

In two decades I've lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.

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.

No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed.

Success is outliving your failures

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?

If I had my life to live over I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage.

Giving birth is little more than a set of muscular contractions granting passage of a child. Then the mother is born.

Encourage independence in your children by regularly losing them in the supermarket.

A member of the committee slapped a name tag over my left bosom. "What shall we name the other one?" I smiled. She was not amused.

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

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.

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.