Top 250 Erma Bombeck Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “Why take pride in cooking, when they don’t take pride in eating?”

— Erma Bombeck

152. “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.”

— Erma Bombeck

153. “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

154. “For the first two years of a child’s life, we spend every waking hour tryibg to get the child to communicate. Then we spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out how we can reverse the process.”

— Erma Bombeck

155. “All of a sudden, I feel very old and very tired. Maybe when I get to California, the smog, brush fires, floods, and earthquakes will cheer me up.”

— Erma Bombeck

156. “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.”

— Erma Bombeck

157. “I’m so bored. I went to the food locker yesterday to visit my meat.”

— Erma Bombeck

158. “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

159. “When the history of guilt is written, parents who refuse their children money will be right up there in the Top Ten.”

— Erma Bombeck

160. “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.”

— Erma Bombeck

161. “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

162. “Success is outliving your failures.”

— Erma Bombeck

163. “In general my children refuse to eat anything that hasn’t danced in television.”

— Erma Bombeck

164. “The hippopotamus is a vegetarian and looks like a wall. Lions who eat only red meat are sleek and slim. Are nutritionists on the wrong track?”

— Erma Bombeck

165. “God created man, but I could do better.”

— Erma Bombeck

166. “If God had meant us to walk around naked, he would never have invented the wicker chair.”

— Erma Bombeck

167. “With all the precautions and risks that accompany sex today, it sounds about as much fun as walking through a minefield.”

— Erma Bombeck

168. “If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.”

— Erma Bombeck

169. “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.”

— Erma Bombeck

170. “Most women put off entertaining until the kids are grown.”

— Erma Bombeck

171. “Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It’s too controversial.”

— Erma Bombeck

172. “Everyone I talked to was a recording-the bank, the elevator, your office, the school, a wrong number. You used to be able to call a wrong number and get a person.”

— Erma Bombeck

173. “I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: ‘Checkout Time is 18 years.’”

— Erma Bombeck

174. “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.”

— Erma Bombeck

175. “Remember, you can lead a fifty-seven-year-old body to motherhood, but you can’t make it stay awake.”

— Erma Bombeck

176. “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.”

— Erma Bombeck

177. “Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.”

— Erma Bombeck

178. “I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.”

— Erma Bombeck

179. “My son did not show signs of a money deficiency until he opened his small fist in the nursery and found it was empty.”

— Erma Bombeck

180. “The mole rat is the only rodent born without a fur coat. With a good lawyer, someone would pay for that little oversight.”

— Erma Bombeck

181. “Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It’s literary suicide.”

— Erma Bombeck

182. “To say, “Well, I write when I really get into it” is a bunch of bull. Put the paper in the typewriter, stare at it a long time, get snowblindness if you have to, but write something.”

— Erma Bombeck

183. “There is nothing more miserable in the world than to arrive in paradise and look like your passport photo.”

— Erma Bombeck

184. “I think it’s time we women stopped carrying supplies for the entire family. If children don’t have room to carry their own toys, if men don’t have pockets in their pants, tougho.”

— Erma Bombeck

185. “Motherhood isn’t just a series of contractions; it’s a state of mind. From the moment we know life is inside us, we feel a responsibility to protect and defend that human being.”

— Erma Bombeck

186. “Who in their infinite wisdom decreed that Little League uniforms be white? Certainly not a mother.”

— Erma Bombeck

187. “For some unexplained reason, it’s always the other end of the table that’s wild and raucous, with screaming laughter and a fella who plays ‘Holiday for Strings’ on water glasses.”

— Erma Bombeck

188. “Phone are wonderful instruments, but I wouldn’t want our daughter to marry one.”

— Erma Bombeck

189. “I’m on a diet as my skin doesn’t fit me anymore.”

— Erma Bombeck

190. “My idea of ‘roughing it’ is when you have to have an extension for your electric blanket.”

— Erma Bombeck

191. “A friend doesn’t go on a diet because you are fat.”

— Erma Bombeck

192. “I haven’t trusted polls since I read that 62% of women had affairs during their lunch hour. I’ve never met a woman in my life who would give up lunch for sex.”

— Erma Bombeck

193. “Limousines used to be reserved for the ruling class, or, on special occasions, for the working class. Today, limousines are like taxicabs with the door handles still intact.”

— Erma Bombeck

194. “Car designers are just going to have to come up with an automobile that outlasts the payments.”

— Erma Bombeck

195. “A child develops individuality long before he develops taste.”

— Erma Bombeck

196. “People usually survive their illnesses, but the paper work eventually does them in. Filing a claim for insurance is terminal.”

— Erma Bombeck

197. “Bombeck’s Rug Rule: an ugly carpet will last for ever.”

— Erma Bombeck

198. “I was trampled to death by a man who believed his luggage would be the first piece off. If he were an experienced traveler, he would know that the first piece of luggage belongs to no one. It’s just a dummy suitcase to give everyone hope.”

— Erma Bombeck

199. “Babies should enjoy the freedom to vocalize whether it be in church, a public meeting place, during a movie, or after hours when the lights are out. They have not yet learned that joy and laughter have to last a lifetime and must be conserved.”

— Erma Bombeck

200. “Someone once threw me a small, brown, hairy kiwi fruit, and I threw a wastebasket over it until it was dead.”

— Erma Bombeck