Erma Bombeck Quotes

110 Sourced Quotes

When children reach the age of sixteen, they discover the meaning of life: car keys.

Erma Bombeck
For years, my husband and I have advocated separate vacations. But the kids keep finding us.

Erma Bombeck
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.

Erma Bombeck
The bad times I can handle. It's the good times that drive me crazy. When is the other shoe going going to drop?

Erma Bombeck
Not all bears have their own television series. Some of them are unemployed wild animals.

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

Erma Bombeck
What we're really talking about is a wonderful day set aside on the fourth Thursday of November when no one diets. I mean, why else would they call it Thanksgiving?

Erma Bombeck
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
If I raised my hand to wipe the hair out of my children's eyes, they'd flinch and call their attorney.

Erma Bombeck
I'm so bored. I went to the food locker yesterday to visit my meat.

Erma Bombeck
Sexually active coat hangers are at their peak when they are in a small closet. We once lived in an apartment with a closet so small it couldn't support a rod... just two nails. Within a week (the shortest gestation in the history of coat hangers) we had thirty-seven of those suckers.

Erma Bombeck
In the mid-nineties a men's movement hit this country with all the force of two marshmallows colliding in midair.... What were they going to ask for? Pay equal to that received by women?

Erma Bombeck
I have just come up with a wonderful solution to end all wars. Let me give directions on how to get there.

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

Erma Bombeck
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.

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

Erma Bombeck
There are few certainties when you travel. One of them is that the moment you arrive in a foreign country, the American dollar will fall like a stone.

Erma Bombeck
There was a time when the respect and trust my children had for me would have made you sick to your stomach. They believed I could blow on a red traffic light and turn it green.

Erma Bombeck
I had no intention of giving her my vital statistics. 'Let me put it this way,' I said. 'According to my girth, I should be a ninety-foot redwood.'

Erma Bombeck
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
It seemed rather incongruous that in a society of supersophisticated communication, we often suffer from a shortage of listeners.

Erma Bombeck
I remember thinking how often we look, but never see … we listen, but never hear … we exist, but never feel. We take our relationships for granted. A house is only a place. It has no life of its own. It needs human voices, activity and laughter to come alive.

Erma Bombeck
One of the things 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.

Erma Bombeck
I got so much food spit back in my face when my kids were small, I put windshield wipers on my glasses.

Erma Bombeck
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
I come from a home where gravy is a beverage.

Erma Bombeck
Enter my first neighbor - a woman who spoke in complete, coherent sentences, who ate with a knife and fork and who only cried at weddings. I couldn't help myself. In a dramatic gesture, I bolted the door and threw my body across it to prevent her exit. She understood.

Erma Bombeck
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
Kids are without a doubt the most suspicious diners in the world. They will eat mud (raw or baked) rocks, paste, crayons, ball-point pens, moving goldfish, cigarette butts, and cat food. Try to coax a little beef stew into their mouths and they look at you like a puppy when you stand over him with the Sunday paper rolled up.

Erma Bombeck
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