ERMA BOMBECK

How come anything you buy will go on sale next week?

Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It's gossip.

I have a theory about the human mind. A brain is a lot like a computer. It will only take so many facts, and then it will go on overload and blow up.

Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I'm taking with me when I go.

My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.

No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick.

A friend doesn't go on a diet because you are fat.

I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security and too tired for an affair.

Do you know what you call those who use towels and never wash them, eat meals and never do the dishes, sit in rooms they never clean, and are entertained till they drop? If you have just answered, 'A house guest,' you're wrong because I have just described my kids.

Youngsters of the age of two and three are endowed with extraordinary strength. They can lift a dog twice their own weight and dump him into the bathtub.

A friend never defends a husband who gets his wife an electric skillet for her birthday.

I haven't trusted polls since I read that 62% of women had affairs during their lunch hour. I've never met a woman in my life who would give up lunch for sex.

If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.

It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.

Someone once threw me a small, brown, hairy kiwi fruit, and I threw a wastebasket over it until it was dead.

Never go to your high school reunion pregnant or they will think that is all you have done since you graduated.

There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.

Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they're not trying to keep up with you.

I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: 'Checkout Time is 18 years.'

House guests should be regarded as perishables: Leave them out too long and they go bad.

Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it.

It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.

What's with you men? Would hair stop growing on your chest if you asked directions somewhere?

All of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.