Quote

Everyone I talked to was a recording-the bank, the elevator, your office, the school, a wrong number. You used to be able to call a wrong number and get a person.

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
School
Humorous
Used
Phones
Persons
Number
Elevator
Able
Office
Elevators
Person
Numbers
Telephones
Call
Recording
Wrong
Talked
Everyone
Bank

More quotes by Erma Bombeck

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My mother phones daily to ask, Did you just try to reach me? When I reply no, she adds, So, if you're not too busy, call me while I'm still alive, . . . and hangs up.
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A friend doesn't go on a diet because you are fat. A friend never defends a husband who gets his wife an electric skillet for her birthday. A friend will tell you she saw your old boyfriend -- and he's a priest.
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A kitchen without an ironing board? Are you kidding? It's un-American. It's like Simon without Garfunkel.
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Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.
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Never order food in excess of your body weight.
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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.
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I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security and too tired for an affair.
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Throughout the years I have set up my own rules about eating food: Never eat anything you can't pronounce. Beware of food that is described as, Some Americans say it tastes like chicken.
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Every puppy should have a boy.
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I got so much food spit back in my face when my kids were small, I put windshield wipers on my glasses.
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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.
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With boys you always know where you stand. Right in the path of a hurricane. It's all there. The fruit flies hovering over their waste can, the hamster trying to escape to cleaner air, the bedrooms decorated in Early Bus Station Restroom.
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Don't worry about who doesn't like you, who has more, or who's doing what.
Erma Bombeck
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Spend at least one Mother's Day with your respective mothers before you decide on marriage. If a man gives his mother a gift certificate for a flu shot, dump him.
Erma Bombeck
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The more I think about it, the more there is to be said for the sloth. He sleeps fifteen to eighteen hours a day and is known to have taken forty-eight days to travel four miles. He hangs in the trees after he's dead. But he lives longer than the cheetah.
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The age of your children is a key factor in how quickly you are served in a restaurant. We once had a waiter in Canada who said, Could I get you your check? and we answered, How about the menu first?
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Kids need love the most when they're acting most unlovable.
Erma Bombeck
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You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.
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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.
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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