A friend doesn’t go on a diet because you are fat. A friend never defends a husband who gets his wife an electric skillet for her birthday. A friend will tell you she saw your old boyfriend – and he’s a priest.
With boys you always know where you stand. Right in the path of a hurricane. It’s all there. The fruit flies hovering over their waste can, the hamster trying to escape to cleaner air, the bedrooms decorated in Early Bus Station Restroom.
With girls, everything looks great on the surface. But beware of drawers that won’t open. They contain a three-month supply of dirty underwear, unwashed hose, and rubber bands with blobs of hair in them.
Parenting is a negative thing. Keep your children from killing themselves, or anyone else, and hope for the best.
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.
When you’re lecturing teenagers and they begin to hum and leave the room, you can sense there is hostility.
I’m on a diet as my skin doesn’t fit me anymore.
When children reach the age of sixteen, they discover the meaning of life: car keys.
We wondered why when a child laughed, he belonged to Daddy, and when he had a sagging diaper that smelled like a landfill, ‘He wants his mother.’
The fact was I didn’t want to look my age, but I didn’t want to act the age I wanted to look either. I also wanted to grow old enough to understand that sentence.
In the South Pacific, because of their size, mosquitoes are required to file flight plans.
If I had my life to live over I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage.
No baby shall at any time be quartered in a house where there are no soft laps, no laughter, or no love.
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.
I became hysterical and frightened and begged for sedation. And that was just the first prenatal visit.
When it comes to cooking, five years ago I felt guilty “just adding water.” Now I want to bang the tube against the countertop and have a five-course meal pop out. If it comes with plastic silverware and a plate that self-destructs, all the better.
After age twelve, birthdays should be as private as hernia surgery.
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.
The Rose Bowl is the only bowl I’ve ever seen that I didn’t have to clean.
You become about as exciting as your food blender. The kids come in, look you in the eye, and ask if anybody’s home.