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To my way of thinking, the American family started to decline when parents began to communicate with their children.

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
Parents
Started
Parent
American
Family
Children
Decline
Way
Began
Thinking
Communicate

More quotes by Erma Bombeck

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It is my theory you can't get rid of fat. All you can do is move it around, like furniture.
Erma Bombeck
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For years, my husband and I have advocated separate vacations. But the kids keep finding us.
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If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.
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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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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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I lost everything in the post-natal depression.
Erma Bombeck
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Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.
Erma Bombeck
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The art of never making a mistake is crucial to motherhood. To be effective and to gain the respect she needs to function, a mother must have her children believe she has never engaged in sex, never made a bad decision, never caused her own mother a moment's anxiety, and was never a child.
Erma Bombeck
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Sex in the nineties is boring. The problem is that it has gone from an active act to a spectator sport. We watch people make love on television and in films. We call 900 numbers to hear what someone would do to us if they weren't sitting in a boiler room of other dirty talkers reading from a prepared script.
Erma Bombeck
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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?
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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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.
Erma Bombeck
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My son would walk to the refrigerator-freezer and fling both doors open and stand there until the hairs in his nose iced up. After surveying $200 worth of food in varying shapes and forms, he would declare loudly, 'There's nothing to eat!'
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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House guests should be regarded as perishables: Leave them out too long and they go bad.
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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There is only one thing harder in this world than forgiving. It's to ask forgiveness armed only with, 'I'm sorry'.
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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Women are never what they seem to be. There is the woman you see and there is the woman who is hidden. Buy the gift for the woman who is hidden.
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