Quotes from Erma Bombeck

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.

The family. We were 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, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.

Laughter rises out of tragedy when you need it the most, and rewards you for your courage.

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

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.

Laugh now, cry later.

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

There's something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she's only measured water in it.

A child needs your love most when he deserves it least

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

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

I come from a home where gravy is a beverage.

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.

Insanity is hereditary. You can catch it from your kids.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

When the going gets tough, the tough make cookies.

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

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.

I don't know why no one ever thought to paste a label on the toilet-tissue spindle giving 1-2-3 directions for replacing the tissue on it. Then everyone in the house would know what Mama knows.