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It's [motherhood] the biggest on-the-job- training program in existence today.

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
Biggest
Program
Training
Existence
Jobs
Today
Motherhood

More quotes by Erma Bombeck

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Never order food in excess of your body weight.
Erma Bombeck
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Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery.
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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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
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In the South Pacific, because of their size, mosquitoes are required to file flight plans.
Erma Bombeck
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It is difficult to single out one sport over another, but if I have to name one in my separation suit, it will undoubtedly be football.
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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In general my children refuse to eat anything that hasn't danced in television.
Erma Bombeck
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I have never understood, for example, how come a child can climb up on the roof, scale the TV antenna, and rescue the cat ... yet cannot walk down the hallway without grabbing both walls with his grubby hands for balance.
Erma Bombeck
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When they told me I needed a mastectomy, I thought of the thousands of luncheons and dinners I had attended where they slapped a name tag on my left bosom. I always smiled and said, 'Now, what shall we name the other one?' That would no longer be a problem.
Erma Bombeck
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Family life got better and we got our car back - as soon as we put 'I love Mom' on the license plate.
Erma Bombeck
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No self-respecting mother would run out of intimidations on the eve of a major holiday.
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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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.
Erma Bombeck
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I do not participate in any sport with ambulances at the bottom of the hill.
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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No One Diets on Thanksgiving.
Erma Bombeck
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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
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I have seen my kid struggle into the kitchen in the morning with outfits that need only one accessory: an empty gin bottle.
Erma Bombeck
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Maybe age is kinder to us than we think. With my bad eyes, I can't see how bad I look, and with my rotten memory, I have a good excuse for getting out of a lot of stuff.
Erma Bombeck