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Know the difference between success and fame. Success is Mother Teresa. Fame is Madonna.

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
Differences
Success
Mother
Teresa
Madonna
Fame
Difference

More quotes by Erma Bombeck

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Those magazine dieting stories always have the testimonial of a woman who wore a dress that could slipcover New Jersey in one photo and thirty days later looked like a well-dressed thermometer.
Erma Bombeck
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If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it.
Erma Bombeck
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Grandparenthood is one of life's rewards for surviving your own children.
Erma Bombeck
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A grandparent will accept your calls from anywhere, collect.
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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There was a time when the respect and trust my children had for me would have made you sick to your stomach. They believed I could blow on a red traffic light and turn it green.
Erma Bombeck
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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.
Erma Bombeck
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Never underestimate what it takes to watch someone you love in pain.
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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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.
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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Every puppy should have a boy.
Erma Bombeck
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When you're lecturing teenagers and they begin to hum and leave the room, you can sense there is hostility.
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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A grandparent is the only baby-sitter who doesn't charge more after midnight - or anything before midnight.
Erma Bombeck
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Myths that need clarification: Everyone in California lives on a white, sandy beach. False. The only people who live on California beaches are vacationers from Arizona, Utah, and Nevada who own condos.
Erma Bombeck
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The family. We are 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. . . and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.
Erma Bombeck
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With all the precautions and risks that accompany sex today, it sounds about as much fun as walking through a minefield.
Erma Bombeck
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Remember, you can lead a fifty-seven-year-old body to motherhood, but you can't make it stay awake.
Erma Bombeck