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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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If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it.
Erma Bombeck
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A kitchen without an ironing board? Are you kidding? It's un-American. It's like Simon without Garfunkel.
Erma Bombeck
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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
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I was leafing through a magazine where there was a before-and-after picture of a woman who went from a size 5 to a size 3 by liposuction. Was she serious? I've cooked bigger turkeys than her before picture.
Erma Bombeck
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Never be in a hurry to terminate a marriage. Remember, you may need this man/woman to finish a sentence.
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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Never loan your car to anyone to whom you've given birth.
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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There are few things in this world more satisfying than having your son teach you how to play tennis, unless it is having a semi-truck run over your foot.
Erma Bombeck
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The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.
Erma Bombeck
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I don't know when pepper mills in a restaurant got to be right behind frankincense and myrrh in prominence. It used to be in a little jar that sat next to the salt on the table and everyone passed it around, sneezed, and it was no big deal.
Erma Bombeck
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Everyone is guilty at one time or another of throwing out questions that beg to be ignored, but mothers seem to have a market on the supply. Do you want a spanking or do you want to go to bed? Don't you want to save some of the pizza for your brother? Wasn't there any change?
Erma Bombeck
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When you leave them in the morning, they stick their nose in the door crack and stand there like a portrait until you turn the key eight hours later.
Erma Bombeck
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I've never vied for power in the family before. Pointing a box at the garage door and saying Open! was never a big deal, but holding that television tuner and realizing I alone control what is flashed on the screen brings out the Iacocca in me.
Erma Bombeck
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My mind works . . . two boobs never get me a job.
Erma Bombeck
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Parenting is a negative thing. Keep your children from killing themselves, or anyone else, and hope for the best.
Erma Bombeck
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My sister and I never engaged in sibling rivalry. Our parents weren't that crazy about either one of us.
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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I love my mother for all the times she said absolutely nothing.... Thinking back on it all, it must have been the most difficult part of mothering she ever had to do: knowing the outcome, yet feeling she had no right to keep me from charting my own path. I thank her for all her virtues, but mostly for never once having said, I told you so.
Erma Bombeck
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Don't worry about who doesn't like you, who has more, or who's doing what.
Erma Bombeck