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

Erma Bombeck

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Erma Bombeck
Age: 69 †
Born: 1927
Born: February 21
Died: 1996
Died: April 22
Column Author
Journalist
Writer
Bellbrook
Ohio
Erma Louise Bombeck
Literature
House
Long
Regarded
Guests
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More quotes by Erma Bombeck

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Friends are annuals that need seasonal nurturing to bear blossoms. Family is a perennial that comes up year after year, enduring the droughts of absence and neglect. There's a place in the garden for both of them.
Erma Bombeck
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Let us hope manufacturers can come up with a diaper that is environmentally sound. To go back to cloth would send us back to the day when breathing and raising a baby at the same time were incompatible.
Erma Bombeck
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. . . but mostly, given another shot at life, I would seize every minute - look at it and really see it - live it - and never give it back.
Erma Bombeck
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Explain to me how he [her son] can ride a bicycle, run, play ball, set up a camp, swing, fight a war, swim and race for eight hours ... and has to be driven to the garbage can.
Erma Bombeck
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Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It's unbridled, its unplanned, it's full of suprises.
Erma Bombeck
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A friend will tell you she saw your old boyfriend - and he's a priest.
Erma Bombeck
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Myths that need clarification: No matter how many times you see the Grand canyon, you are still emotionally moved to tears. False. It depends on how many children the out-of-towners brought with them who kicked the back of your seat from Phoenix to Flagstaff and got their gum caught in your hair.
Erma Bombeck
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I didn't fight my way to the top of the food chain to be a vegetarian.
Erma Bombeck
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It would have been a wonderful wedding - had it not been mine.
Erma Bombeck
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There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.
Erma Bombeck
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Enter my first neighbor - a woman who spoke in complete, coherent sentences, who ate with a knife and fork and who only cried at weddings. I couldn't help myself. In a dramatic gesture, I bolted the door and threw my body across it to prevent her exit. She understood.
Erma Bombeck
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Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.
Erma Bombeck
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Giving birth is little more than a set of muscular contractions granting passage of a child. Then the mother is born.
Erma Bombeck
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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
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Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.
Erma Bombeck
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Phone are wonderful instruments, but I wouldn't want our daughter to marry one.
Erma Bombeck
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Last year I gave seventy-four phone hours to soliciting baked goods for the Bake-A-Rama. I was named Top Call Girl by the League.
Erma Bombeck
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You show me a boy who brings a snake home to his mother and I'll show you an orphan.
Erma Bombeck
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When they told me I needed a mastectomy, I thought of the thousands of luncheons and dinners I had attended where they slapped a name tag on my left bosom. I always smiled and said, 'Now, what shall we name the other one?' That would no longer be a problem.
Erma Bombeck
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Early in my life I had made a pact with myself. I would never eat anything that moved when I cooked it, excited the dog, or inflated upon impact with my teeth.
Erma Bombeck