Erma Bombeck Quotes - Page 2

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.

It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.

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. These are great dreams, but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say, 'How good or how bad am I?' That's where courage comes in.

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?

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.

It seemed rather incongruous that in a society of super sophisticated communication, we often suffer from a shortage of listeners.

If the nest is truly empty, who owns all this junk?

When the going gets tough, the tough make cookies.

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.

He who laughs.....lasts.

It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.

If I had my life to live over again, I would have waxed less and listened more. ... I would have cried and laughed less while watching television ... and more while watching real life. ... But mostly, given another shot at life, I would seize every minute of it ... look at it and really see it ... try it on ... live it ... exhaust it ... and never give the minute back until there was nothing left of it.

Cleaning the house while the children are home is like shoveling while it's still snowing.

He opened the jar of pickles when no one else could. He was the only one in the house who wasn't afraid to go into the basement by himself. He cut himself shaving, but no one kissed it or got excited about it. It was understood when it rained, he got the car and brought it around to the door. When anyone was sick, he went out to get the prescription filled. He took lots of pictures... but he was never in them.

Mothers are not the nameless, faceless stereotypes who appear once a year on a greeting card with their virtues set to prose, but women who have been dealt a hand for life and play each card one at a time the best way they know how. No mother is all good or all bad, all laughing or all serious, all loving or all angry. Ambivalence rushes through their veins.

Cats invented self-esteem.

It's [motherhood] the biggest on-the-job- training program in existence today.

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.

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

All of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.

It is my theory you can't get rid of fat. All you can do is move it around, like furniture.

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.

The term 'working mother' is redundant.

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

A grandparent will help you with your buttons, your zippers, and your shoelaces and not be in any hurry for you to grow up.