Erma Bombeck

Why would anyone steal a shopping cart? It's like stealing a two-year-old.

There's something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she's only measured water in it.

Children make your life important.

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.

Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.

A friend will tell you she saw your old boyfriend - and he's a priest.

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.

For some of us, watching a miniseries that lasts longer than most marriages is not easy.

My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.

How come anything you buy will go on sale next week?

I have a theory about the human mind. A brain is a lot like a computer. It will only take so many facts, and then it will go on overload and blow up.

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

I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: 'Checkout Time is 18 years.'

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.

I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security and too tired for an affair.

Never accept a drink from a urologist.

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

A grandmother pretends she doesn't know who you are on Halloween.

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

Never order food in excess of your body weight.

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.

People shop for a bathing suit with more care than they do a husband or wife. The rules are the same. Look for something you'll feel comfortable wearing. Allow for room to grow.

I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes.

My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.

Most women put off entertaining until the kids are grown.

One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child's name and how old he or she is.

It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.

House guests should be regarded as perishables: Leave them out too long and they go bad.

Onion rings in the car cushions do not improve with time.

On vacations: We hit the sunny beaches where we occupy ourselves keeping the sun off our skin, the saltwater off our bodies, and the sand out of our belongings.

It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.

There is one thing I have never taught my body how to do and that is to figure out at 6 A.M. what it wants to eat at 6 P.M.

Somewhere it is written that parents who are critical of other people's children and publicly admit they can do better are asking for it.

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

In general my children refuse to eat anything that hasn't danced in television.

God created man, but I could do better.

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.

Youngsters of the age of two and three are endowed with extraordinary strength. They can lift a dog twice their own weight and dump him into the bathtub.

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.

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.

If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it.

My theory on housework is, if the item doesn't multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one else cares. Why should you?

Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

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

Don't confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.

Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.

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