Great Throughts Treasury

"Great dreams... never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say, How good or how bad am I? That's where courage comes in."

"Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving."

"He who laughs... lasts."

"Have you any idea how many children it takes to turn off one light in the kitchen Three. It takes one to say ‘What light?’ and two more to say ‘I didn't turn it on.’"

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

"Housework, if it is done properly, can cause brain damage."

"Housework can kill you if done right"

"Housework, if you do it right, will kill you."

"Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide."

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

"Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It's unbridled, it's unplanned, it's full of surprises."

"Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop offs at tedium and counter productivity."

"I am not a glutton - I am an explorer of food"

"I can't," said God, "I'm so close to creating something so close to myself. Already I have one who heals herself when she is sick...can feed a family of six on one pound of hamburger...and can get a nine year old to stand under a shower.""

"I don't know why no one ever thought to paste a label on the toilet-tissue spindle giving 1-2-3 directions for replacing the tissue on it. Then everyone in the house would know what Mama knows."

"I come from a family [home] where gravy is considered a beverage."

"I do not participate in any sport with ambulances at the bottom of the hill."

"I don't know when pepper mills in a restaurant got to be right behind frankincense and myrrh in prominence. It used to be in a little jar that sat next to the salt on the table and everyone passed it around, sneezed, and it was no big deal."

"I have a hat. It is graceful and feminine and give me a certain dignity, as if I were attending a state funeral or something. Someday I may get up enough courage to wear it, instead of carrying it."

"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."

"I just clipped two articles from a current magazine. One is a diet guaranteed to drop five pounds off my body in a weekend. The other is a recipe for a six-minute pecan pie."

"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."

"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."

"I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression."

"I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes."

"I question the value of name tags as an aid to future identification. I have approached too many people who have spent the entire evening talking to my left bosom. I always have the insane desire to name the other one."

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

"I think it's time we women stopped carrying supplies for the entire family. If children don't have room to carry their own toys, if men don't have pockets in their pants, tougho."

"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."

"I read one psychologist's theory that said, "Never strike a child in your anger." When could I strike him? When he is kissing me on my birthday? When he's recuperating from measles? Do I slap the Bible out of his hand on Sunday?"

"I was leafing through a magazine where there was a before-and-after picture of a woman who went from a size 5 to a size 3 by liposuction. Was she serious? I've cooked bigger turkeys than her before picture."

"I think one of the real tests of a stable marriage is being married to a man who worships at the shrine of burnt food -- the back-yard chef."

"I was going to have inner peace if I had to break a few heads to do it."

"I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order."

"I wanted to go to a place where you were important and people listened to what you had to say. Mothering hadn't done that ... and yet ... wouldn't it be ironic if my turf yielded the most important commodity being grown today? A family? A crop of children, seeded by two people, nourished by love, watered by tears, and in eighteen or twenty years harvested into worthwhile human beings to go through the process again."

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

"I worry about scientists discovering that lettuce has been fattening all along. . . ."

"I will buy any creme, cosmetic, or elixir from a woman with a European accent."

"If God had meant us to walk around naked, he would never have invented the wicker chair."

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

"IF I HAD MY LIFE TO LIVE OVER: I would have talked less and listened more. I would have invited friends over to dinner even if the carpet was stained and the sofa faded. I would have eaten the popcorn in the "good" living room and worried much less about the dirt when someone wanted to light a fire in the fireplace. I would have taken the time to listen to my grandfather rambling about his youth. I would never have insisted the car windows be rolled up on a summer day because my hair had just been teased and sprayed. I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage. I would have sat on the lawn with my children and not worried about grass stains. I would have cried and laughed less while watching television, and more while watching life. I would have gone to bed when I was sick, instead of pretending the earth would go into a holding pattern if I weren't there for the day. I would never have bought anything just because it was practical, wouldn't show soil or was guaranteed to last a lifetime. Instead of wishing away nine months of pregnancy, I'd have cherished every moment, realizing that the wonderment growing inside me was the only chance in life to assist God in a miracle. When my kids kissed me impetuously, I would never have said, "Later. Now go get washed up for dinner." There would have been more "I love you's" and more "I'm sorry's.". . . but mostly, given another shot at life, I would seize every minute . . . look at it and really see it . . . and never give it back.”"

"If life is a bowl of cherries, then what am I doing in the pits?"

"If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it."

"If you can laugh at it, you can live with it."

"I'm going to stop punishing my children by saying, "Never mind! I'll do it myself.""

"I'm trying very hard to understand this generation. They have adjusted the timetable for childbearing so that menopause and teaching a sixteen-year-old how to drive a car will occur in the same week."

"In general my children refuse to eat anything that hasn't danced in television."

"In all honesty, men changed a few rules when they became what was referred to as househusbands. Bill didn't make beds, cook, dust, do laundry, windows or floors, or give birth. What he did do was pay bills, call people to fix the plumbing, handle the investments and taxes, volunteer big time, take papers to the garage, change license plates, get the cars serviced, and pick up the cleaning. If women had had that kind of schedule, who knows, we'd probably still be in the home."

"In retrospect, it was only a matter of time before the Family Dinner passed into history and fast foods took over. I knew its days were numbered the day our youngest propped my mouth open with a fork and yelled into it, "I want a cheeseburger and two fries and get it right this time." I just didn't serve meals with show business pizzazz."

"In general, my children refused to eat anything that hadn't danced on TV."