Quotes from Erma Bombeck

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

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

When you look like your passport photo, it's time to go home.

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.

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.

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

One never realizes how different a husband and wife can be until they begin to pack for a trip.

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.

Housework, if it is done properly, can cause brain damage.

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.

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

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.

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.

Anybody who watches three games of football in a row should be declared brain dead.

Grandparenthood is one of life's rewards for surviving your own children.

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.

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.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

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.

Families aren't easy to join. They're like an exclusive country club where membership makes impossible demands and the dues for an outsider are exorbitant.

It's frightening to wake up one morning and discover that while you were asleep you went out of style.

You show me a boy who brings a snake home to his mother and I'll show you an orphan.

Throughout the years I have set up my own rules about eating food: Never eat anything you can't pronounce. Beware of food that is described as, Some Americans say it tastes like chicken.

No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed.