Erma Bombeck Quotes

There are two kinds of cruises - pleasure and with children.

There are two ways to travel, first class or with children.

We all know to feel sympathy for those who've suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!

Hair is vitally personal to children. They weep vigorously when it is cut for the first time; no matter how it grows, bushy, straight or curly, they feel they are being shorn of a part of their personality.

His lies were so exquisite I almost wept.

It is always tedious when someone tells you that if you don't stop crying, they will give you something to cry about, because if you are crying then you already have something to cry about, and so there is no reason for them to give you anything additional to cry about, thank you very much.

A woman's sentimental monkeyshines will always deceive her lover, who invariably waxes ecstatic where her husband necessarily shrugs his shoulders.

You can't tell an audience to like a character. And I think the best way to get the audience on someone's side is to embarrass them.

[On writing her first poem at age eight:] An ode to my dead mother and father, who were both alive and pretty pissed off.

The laughter of adults was always very different from the laughter of children. The former indicated a recognition of the familiar, but in children it came from the shock of the new.

Does your ma know you're this silly?" she demanded tartly. He nodded, comically sad. "The few gray hairs she has on her head are my doing. But" — with an exaggerated change of mood — "I send her plenty of money, so she can pay to have them dyed!" "I hope she beat you as a child," Onua grumbled.

If your husband expects you to laugh, do so; if he expects you to cry, don't; if you don't know what he expects, what are you doing married?

If someone criticizes my child it's gonna hurt me a little bit, but it's my child, you know, and I love it regardless.

Let this sad tale of death never be told without a tear: let every parent tell the shameful story to his listening children, till tears of pity glisten in their eyes, or boiling passion shakes their tender frames.

Michael has never cried during a Broadway show. Except in that scene where Tarzan's ape father is brutally murdered. And that was only because he was laughing so hard.

A man was like a child with his appetites. A woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would probably turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a very pleasant connection.

Why do our parents have the ability to make us feel like children even when our hair is graying and we have a mortgage that feels like a Third World debt? (135)

The quickest way to take the starch out of someone who is always blaming himself is to agree with him.

That fool of a fairy Lucinda did not intend to lay a curse on me. She meant to bestow a gift. When I cried inconsolably through my first hour of life, my tears were her inspiration. Shaking her head sympathetically at Mother, the fairy touched my nose. "My gift is obedience. Ella will always be obedient. Now stop crying, child." I stopped.

He produced mainly three results: Hatred, Terror, Adoration.

Sitting in the movie theater watching "Star Wars," I've never had an experience with any form of entertainment that was like that. It was almost spiritual. I couldn't believe that someone's mind created that. And, right, it felt like George Lucas had a piano that was playing my emotions, and he could go ahead and do whatever he wanted and make me lean forward if he wanted, or he could make me go oh, or he could make me hide my face.

There are subtle ways and overt ways of alienating a child from a parent, but either way it's evil

It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child.

The way I feel about it is: Beat me or feed me, but don't tease me. It's toy food; who needs it? Serve it to toy people.