Erma Bombeck Quotes

I woke up on May 15, 1991, the day of my Barnard graduation, and I said to myself, 'By the end of today you will decide what you want to do with the rest of your life.'

Sometimes I'll be sitting on Facebook at home and see all these people getting married, having kids, having that life that I was told I should have. And sometimes I feel like I'm doing something wrong. Am I the stupid one here? Am I not doing what I'm supposed to do? And that's also equally as stressful.

Once I hit 25, people started asking me about marriage and kids all the time. I remember hitting 35 and some would ask the same questions with a strange tone, as if my life was somehow over because I hadn't yet settled into their version of happiness.

Thirty is still the iconic number. It's when people compare their actual lives with what they think they should have achieved.

We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments of the other mind.

When I was first pregnant, which was, let's see, in nineteen-eighty-three - I remember wearing a regular bathing suit to my in-laws' pool. It was just like a spandex one-piece, completely modest, and yet people were looking at me like it was obscene.

I was very frustrated, in a physical sense, by people seeing me in a way that I wasn't. And I was beginning to find myself boxed into a corner. Hopefully things have loosed up a bit, and I've gotten better and become more relaxed as an actor.

After graduating in the summer of 1980, I knew I wanted my life to count.

It's pathetic to have regrets about fashion. Things to do with my life, yes, I have regrets there.

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.

They are the guiding oracles which man has found out for himself in that great business of ours, of learning how to be, to do, to do without, and to depart.

My daughter finished high school the same month I got my master's degree. I'm glad I didn't know when I gave birth to her at 21 what it would cost in terms of time, money and sacrifice to bring her to that graduation day.

The only thing that mattered was what you were to do in life, and it wasn't about money. It was about teaching, or learning.

It was easy for me to leave acting for school, because I wasn't really in it as an adolescent for fulfilling reasons.

I was about to get a degree in economics when I accepted that I'd be a lousy businessman, and if I didn't give acting a try I'd regret it for the rest of my life.

I don't think people should do things because you know, 'I am turning this age, I must go have a husband.' If you find somebody and it works out then have kids, it's very nice. But if you don't, you don't.

Everybody wants you to do good things, but in a small town you pretty much graduate and get married. Mostly you marry, have children and go to their football games.

At my age, no one is married, no one has kids, no one has a career.

After I left college I thought, very naively, that either you became someone interesting - an artist - or you went into academia. If you ended up in an office you were dull and lacking. And I ended up in an office.

My parents got married late and they had kids late, so I never felt a social or cultural thing to be married or pregnant or a homeowner by a certain age.

No one I know is actually so rude as to tell me I've become duller since having children. But I'm sure they think it.

Some people can get away with being very sexy to men and not looking like a complete cow, but I didn't think I was in a position where people knew me well enough.

When you hit 30, it's that time of self-reflection. Some people are a success. Some people feel like they haven't achieved what they wanted to. Some people are married, some have kids, some are still single.

Lord knows, I never want to waste any more of my time in mirrors.

It is hard enough to make a plan for how you are going to spend an evening with somebody else. So to make a plan for how you are going to behave in 25 years seems based on a view of life that is incomprehensible to me.