Bombeck’s Rug Rule: an ugly carpet will last for ever.
I have paid as much as $300 a night to throw up into a sink shaped like a seashell.
Once you see the drivers in Indonesia you understand why religion plays such a part in their lives.
As a graduate of the Zsa Zsa Gabor School of Creative mathematics, I honestly do not know how old I am.
I have always felt cookbooks were fiction and the most beautiful words in the English language were ’room service.
Any mother with half a skull knows that when Daddy’s little boy becomes Mommy’s little boy, the kid is so wet he’s treading water.
A grandparent will help you with your buttons, your zippers, and your shoelaces and not be in any hurry for you to grow up.
I have just come up with a wonderful solution to end all wars. Let me give directions on how to get there.
The term ‘working mother’ is redundant.
A grandparent will accept your calls from anywhere, collect.
I lost everything in the post-natal depression.
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 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. These are great dreams, but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say, ‘How good or how bad am I?’ That’s where courage comes in.
I loved you enough to accept you for what you are, not what I wanted you to be.
There are basic differences between food and clothing. You eat food and wear clothing. Food goes in; clothing goes on. 2. Do not bite anything that will bite back. This includes the dog, other babies, electrical cords and your father when he is watching professional football on television. 3. Washing your face after a meal is not considered cruel and unusual punishment. It won’t do any good to report Mommy and Daddy to the police. 4.
When a man’s got cream in the refrigerator at home, he won’t go out looking for two-percent butterfat.
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, “I used everything you gave me” Erma Bombeck as quoted in A Christmas Blessing.
I brought children into this lousy, mixed-up world because when you love someone and they love you back, the world doesn’t look that lousy or seem that mixed up.
Okies who had just stepped into the corridor long enough to get a tin can of water for our boiling radiator. There are other stories, other dilemmas, but the characters never change. We’re always standing around, unwashed, uncurled, harried, penniless, memory gone, no lipstick, no hose, unmatched shoes, and using the dirtiest cloth in the house to bind our wounds. Makes.
A child develops individuality long before he develops taste. I have seen my kid straggle into the kitchen in the morning with outfits that need only one accessory: an empty gin bottle.
All I know is I was possibly the only woman in the world dedicated to inner peace and tranquility who would end up with varicose veins of the neck from shouting.