Quotes from Erma Bombeck

Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.

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

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.

Before we sent kids to computer camps and told them they were having a good time, there was imagination among the human species.

Kids need love the most when they're acting most unlovable.

Some emotions don't make a lot of noise. It's hard to hear pride. Caring is real faint - like a heartbeat. And pure love - why, some days it's so quiet, you don't even know it's there.

A child needs your love most when he deserves it least

Never order food in excess of your body weight.

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

A grandmother pretends she doesnít know who you are on Halloween.

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.

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

Volunteers are the only human beings on the face of the earth who reflect this nation's compassion, unselfish caring, patience, and just plain love for one another.

I wanted to go to a place where you were important and people listened to what you had to say. Mothering hadn't done that ... and yet ... wouldn't it be ironic if my turf yielded the most important commodity being grown today? A family? A crop of children, seeded by two people, nourished by love, watered by tears, and in eighteen or twenty years harvested into worthwhile human beings to go through the process again.

In the minds of women, fatherhood used to be considered a part-time job. It was something men did at the end of the day between parking the car for the night and going to bed.

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.

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.

You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren't dying. They're merging into big conglomerates.

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.

Sex is only a three-letter word so how can it be dirty?

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.

I've always felt there are two things a woman should never do after the age of thirty-five: stand in natural light and have a baby.

I think one of the real tests of a stable marriage is being married to a man who worships at the shrine of burnt food -- the back-yard chef.

Children should be judged on what they are -- a punishment for an early marriage.