Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Erma Bombeck
Age: 69 †
Born: 1927
Born: February 21
Died: 1996
Died: April 22
Column Author
Journalist
Writer
Bellbrook
Ohio
Erma Louise Bombeck
Made
Green
Would
Sick
Time
Trust
Respect
Traffic
Turn
Stomach
Turns
Red
Light
Believed
Children
Blow

More quotes by Erma Bombeck

Image
There is nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child. ... Time, self-pity, apathy, bitterness, and exhaustion can take the Christmas out of the child, but you cannot take the child out of Christmas.
Erma Bombeck
Image
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
Image
Babies should enjoy the freedom to vocalize whether it be in church, a public meeting place, during a movie, or after hours when the lights are out. They have not yet learned that joy and laughter have to last a lifetime and must be conserved.
Erma Bombeck
Image
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
Image
Shopping is a woman thing. It's a contact sport like football. Women enjoy the scrimmage, the noisy crowds, the danger of being trampled to death, and the ecstasy of the purchase.
Erma Bombeck
Image
I read one psychologist's theory that said, Never strike a child in your anger. When could I strike him? When he is kissing me on my birthday? When he's recuperating from measles? Do I slap the Bible out of his hand on Sunday?
Erma Bombeck
Image
A grandparent is the only baby-sitter who doesn't charge more after midnight - or anything before midnight.
Erma Bombeck
Image
I have paid as much as $300 a night to throw up into a sink shaped like a seashell.
Erma Bombeck
Image
I firmly believe kids don't want your understanding. They want your trust, your compassion, your blinding love and your car keys, but you try to understand them and you're in big trouble.
Erma Bombeck
Image
If compliments were food, I'd have starved to death 28 years ago.
Erma Bombeck
Image
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
Image
How come anything you buy will go on sale next week?
Erma Bombeck
Image
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.
Erma Bombeck
Image
My sister and I never engaged in sibling rivalry. Our parents weren't that crazy about either one of us.
Erma Bombeck
Image
You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren't dying. They're merging into big conglomerates.
Erma Bombeck
Image
I will never understand children. I never pretended to. I meet mothers all the time who make resolutions to themselves. 'I'm going to ... go out of my way to show them I am interested in them and what they do. I am going to understand my children.' These women end up making rag rugs, using blunt scissors.
Erma Bombeck
Image
Never underestimate what it takes to watch someone you love in pain.
Erma Bombeck
Image
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
Image
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.
Erma Bombeck
Image
I remember thinking how often we look, but never see ... we listen, but never hear ... we exist, but never feel. We take our relationships for granted. A house is only a place. It has no life of its own. It needs human voices, activity and laughter to come alive.
Erma Bombeck