Erma Bombeck quotes:

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.

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

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.

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.

Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It's too controversial.

Do you know what you call those who use towels and never wash them, eat meals and never do the dishes, sit in rooms they never clean, and are entertained till they drop? If you have just answered, 'A house guest,' you're wrong because I have just described my kids.

On vacations: We hit the sunny beaches where we occupy ourselves keeping the sun off our skin, the saltwater off our bodies, and the sand out of our belongings.

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.

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.

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 your high school reunion pregnant or they will think that is all you have done since you graduated.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery.

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

There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.

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.

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.

Never order food in excess of your body weight.

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.

A friend will tell you she saw your old boyfriend - and he's a priest.

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.

Children make your life important.

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

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

What's with you men? Would hair stop growing on your chest if you asked directions somewhere?

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

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

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

In general my children refuse to eat anything that hasn't danced in television.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child's name and how old he or she is.

When a child is locked in the bathroom with water running and he says he's doing nothing but the dog is barking, call 911.

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

Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.

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

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

It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows

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.

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.

My mother won't admit it, but I've always been a disappointment to her. Deep down inside, she'll never forgive herself for giving birth to a daughter who refuses to launder aluminium foil and use it over again.

I do not participate in any sport with ambulances at the bottom of the hill.

If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I convinced him his luggage had gone to that big Bermuda Triangle in the sky.

I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.

You become about as exciting as your food blender. The kids come in, look you in the eye, and ask if anybody's home.

Sex in the nineties is boring. The problem is that it has gone from an active act to a spectator sport. We watch people make love on television and in films. We call 900 numbers to hear what someone would do to us if they weren't sitting in a boiler room of other dirty talkers reading from a prepared script.

The family. We are a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms. . . and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.

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

Maybe you know why a child can reject a hot dog with mustard served on a soft bun at home, yet eat six of them two hours later at fifty cents each.

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

Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?

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

Cats invented self-esteem.

Spend at least one Mother's Day with your respective mothers before you decide on marriage. If a man gives his mother a gift certificate for a flu shot, dump him.

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.

I love my mother for all the times she said absolutely nothing.... Thinking back on it all, it must have been the most difficult part of mothering she ever had to do: knowing the outcome, yet feeling she had no right to keep me from charting my own path. I thank her for all her virtues, but mostly for never once having said, "I told you so.

I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: 'Checkout Time is 18 years.'

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.

If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?

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.

Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter productivity.

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.

Housework can kill you if done right.

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.

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.

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

It's the three pairs of eyes that mothers have to have...One pair that see through closed doors. Another in the back of her head...and, of course, the ones in front that can look at a child when he goofs up and reflect 'I understand and I love you' without so much as uttering a word.

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.

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

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.

A fitting room to me has always been like a confessional ... where my body and my contrition take up the entire room.

I am not a glutton - I am an explorer of food

What does it profit a 78-year-old woman to sit around the pool in a bikini if she cannot feed herself?

I will buy any creme, cosmetic, or elixir from a woman with a European accent.

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.

I'm real ambivalent about [working mothers]. Those of use who have been in the women's movement for a long time know that we've talked a good game of "go out and fulfill your dreams" and "be everything you were meant to be." But by the same token, we want daughters-in-law who are going to stay home and raise our grandchildren.

It is ludicrous to read the microwave direction on the boxes of food you buy, as each one will have a disclaimer: THIS WILL VARY WITH YOUR MICROWAVE. Loosely translated, this means, You're on your own, Bernice.

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

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

My idea of 'roughing it' is when you have to have an extension for your electric blanket.

When mothers talk about the depression of the empty nest, they're not mourning the passing of all those wet towels on the floor, or the music that numbs your teeth, or even the bottle of capless shampoo dribbling down the shower drain. They're upset because they've gone from supervisor of a child's life to a spectator. It's like being the vice president of the United States.

It is upsetting to many parents that their teen-agers introduce them to their friends as encyclopedia salesmen who are just passing through ... if they introduce them at all. I have some acquaintances who hover in dark parking lots, enter church separately and crouch in furnace rooms so their teen-agers will not be accused of having parents.

Most women put off entertaining until the kids are grown.

Family life got better and we got our car back - as soon as we put 'I love Mom' on the license plate.

I worry about scientists discovering that lettuce has been fattening all along.

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

I don't know when pepper mills in a restaurant got to be right behind frankincense and myrrh in prominence. It used to be in a little jar that sat next to the salt on the table and everyone passed it around, sneezed, and it was no big deal.

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.

the ultimate in longevity is the Christmas fruitcake. It is a cake made during the holidays with fruits that make it heavier than the stove it is cooked in.

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.

No One Diets on Thanksgiving.

The mole rat is the only rodent born without a fur coat. With a good lawyer, someone would pay for that little oversight.

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.

Let me put it this way. According to my girth, I should be a ninety-foot redwood.

Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It's gossip.

As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.

A grandmother pretends she doesn't know who you are on Halloween.

The grass is always greener over the septic tank.

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.

After age twelve, birthdays should be as private as hernia surgery.

Phrases and their actual meanings: My teacher has never liked me. Expect a phone call before lunch from the teacher informing you that your child has been launching hot dogs by compressing them inside a small Thermos and then removing the lid quickly.

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