Top 250 Erma Bombeck Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “I lost everything in the post-natal depression.”

— Erma Bombeck

152. “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

153. “Cats invented self-esteem.”

— Erma Bombeck

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

— Erma Bombeck

155. “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

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

— Erma Bombeck

157. “Why take pride in cooking, when they don’t take pride in eating?”

— Erma Bombeck

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Erma Bombeck

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Erma Bombeck

166. “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

167. “Success is outliving your failures.”

— Erma Bombeck

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

— Erma Bombeck

169. “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

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

— Erma Bombeck

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

— Erma Bombeck

172. “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

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

— Erma Bombeck

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

— Erma Bombeck

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

— Erma Bombeck

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

— Erma Bombeck

177. “The Rose Bowl is the only bowl I’ve ever seen that I didn’t have to clean.”

— Erma Bombeck

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Erma Bombeck

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

— Erma Bombeck

182. “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

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

— Erma Bombeck

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Erma Bombeck

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Erma Bombeck

196. “Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You’re not out of it until the computer says you’re out of it.”

— Erma Bombeck

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

— Erma Bombeck

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

— Erma Bombeck

199. “Never have more children than you have car windows.”

— Erma Bombeck

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

— Erma Bombeck