Quotes from Erma Bombeck

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

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.

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.

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

Parenting is a negative thing. Keep your children from killing themselves, or anyone else, and hope for the best.

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.

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.

We've got a generation now who were born with semiequality. They don't know how it was before, so they think, this isn't too bad. We're working. We have our attache' cases and our three piece suits. I get very disgusted with the younger generation of women. We had a torch to pass, and they are just sitting there. They don't realize it can be taken away. Things are going to have to get worse before they join in fighting the battle.

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

When your mother asks, "Do you want a piece of advice?" it's a mere formality. It doesn't matter if you answer yes or no. You're going to get it anyway.

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

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

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

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

Don't worry about who doesn't like you, who has more, or who's doing what.

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.

Housework can kill you if done right.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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