Erma Bombeck Quotes

You shouldn't be eating anything that takes six minutes to microwave.

My daughter Alexandra once told me, "Mother, you're a pioneer. Now, hardly anybody cooks, but you were one of the first to stop." After 20 years of cooking, I started to appreciate the value of other people's work. So I would, say, go get a duck in Chinatown. I always had the salad and set the table, but I didn't have to clean the pots.

People say they don't have time to cook, yet in the last few years we have found an extra two hours a day for the internet.

I like baked potatoes. I don't have a microwave oven, and it takes forever to bake a potato in a conventional oven. Sometimes I'll just throw one in there, even if I don't want one, because by the time it's done, who knows?

It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready made.

For thousands of years, most marriages were in Stage I--survival-focused. After World War II, marriages increasingly flirted with Stage II--a self-fulfillment focus... Love's definition is in a transition.

Character cannot be summoned at the moment of crisis if it has been squandered by years of compromise and rationalization. The only testing ground for the heroic is the mundane. The only preparation for that one profound decision which can change a life, or even a nation, is those hundreds of half-conscious, self defining, seemingly insignificant decisions made in private. Habit is the daily battleground of character.

What I want to achieve, what I have been striving and pining for these thirty years, is self-realization, that is, to see God face to face.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

I never go see a comic. The only one I'd ever really want to see is Don Rickles. He might be 80 years old, but he blows everyone out of the water.

These new metal bands are going out, getting drunk and going to strip clubs, and they'll be doing the same in thirty years. There isn't even an interesting self-destructive quality to it . . . it's just dumb.

My name is Asher Lev... I am a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflicter of shame upon my family, my friends, my people; also, I am a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous manipulator of modes and forms revered by Gentiles for two thousand years.

I'm 57, I can't look like a 30-year-old. You try to hold age at bay, but there comes a point when you just have to give up gracefully.

How much courage does it take to fire up your tractor and plow under a crop you spent six or seven years growing? How much courage to go on and do that after you've spent all that time finding out how to prepare the soil and when to plant and how much to water and when to reap? How much to just say, "I have to quit these peas. Peas are no good for me, I better try corn or beans.

We forget that the world is what we imagine it to be. We stop being the sun and become, instead, the pool of water reflecting it.

All these years you've been searching and looking and trying to change things, trying to add thing onto yourself, trying to acquire things when you have been the source of everything to begin with. Everything you've been looking for has been within yourself you have been that. You then begin to surrender everything to yourself. You surrender all of your thoughts, all of your feelings, you surrender all of your desires, all of your wants to the Self. You pull it in all inwardly.

I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona.

Pyp had stabbed a turnip with his knife. "The night is dark and full of turnips," he announced in a solemn voice. "Let us all pray for venison, my children, with some onions and a bit of tasty gravy.

Strip the hills, drain the boglands, and you create flood conditions inevitably. Yet that is what we have been doing for years.

I'm kind of putting my toe back in the water and seeing how it feels. We're going to be doing stuff we haven't done for years and years and years. So I'm looking forward to seeing how this stuff flies.

The fast-food industry has moved into the grocery store, so you no longer have to go to a fast-food chain to find problematic foods.

On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence.

Fire and Water are archetypes, the split sides of consciousness; one aware, the other, not. The two parts of us that desire synthesis, yet resist it: the self and the shadow. But they are also the element of chance, of the random roll of dice.

Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it.

I actually did do a musical many years ago with John Waters called Cry-Baby, but technically it was only half me - it wasn't me singing. Tim's [ Burton] the only person brave enough to actually let me try to sing.