This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security and too tired for an affair.
Mother |
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
It is fast approaching the point where I don't want to elect anyone stupid enough to want the job.
Children |
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.
Mother |
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
But some emotions don't make a lot of noise. It's hard to hear pride. Caring is real faint - like a heartbeat. And pure love why, some days it's so quiet, you don't even know it's there.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
The angel circled the model of a mother very slowly. "It's too soft," she sighed.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
The angel shook her head slowly and said. "Six pairs of hands.... no way."
I have been doing the photography all my life but I’ve only been doing the manipulations for about four or five years. What takes most time in the production process is the planning. With good planning the other steps don’t take so long. If I have a good idea I will add it to my list of projects that I want to realise. The photography, for me, is a way to get material because my work is created on a computer afterwards. From the idea to the final image, it can take between a week and a month.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
In general, my children refused to eat anything that hadn't danced on TV.
Children |
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
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.
Children |
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
It is upsetting to many parents that their teen-agers introduce them to their friends as encyclopedia salesmen who are just passing through ... if they introduce them at all. I have some acquaintances who hover in dark parking lots, enter church separately and crouch in furnace rooms so their teen-agers will not be accused of having parents.
Compassion | Judgment | Mother |
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.
Children |
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
Raising a family wasn't something I put on my resumé, but I have to ask myself, would I apply for the same job again?
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
No self-respecting mother would run out of intimidations on the eve of a major holiday.
Children |
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.
The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive
Capacity | Eternal | Individual | Lesson | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Men | Problems | Rank | Sense | Society | World | Society | Trouble |
When we are young we are often puzzled by the fact that each person we admire seems to have a different version of what life ought to be, what a good man is, how to live, and so on. If we are especially sensitive it seems more than puzzling, it is disheartening. What most people usually do is to follow one person's ideas and then another's depending on who looms largest on one's horizon at the time. The one with the deepest voice, the strongest appearance, the most authority and success, is usually the one who gets our momentary allegiance; and we try to pattern our ideals after him. But as life goes on we get a perspective on this and all these different versions of truth become a little pathetic. Each person thinks that he has the formula for triumphing over life's limitations and knows with authority what it means to be a man, and he usually tries to win a following for his particular patent. Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of view because it is more than merely an outlook on life: it is an immortality formula.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
But then we did not think of ourselves as poor. We did not accept it. we thought we were superior people and other people that we looked down on and rightly mistrusted were rich.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
Even if he was ever afraid he knew that he could do it anyway.
Ernest Bramah, born Ernest Brammah Smith
"Excellence," besought Kai Lung, not without misgivings, "how many warriors, each having some actual existence, are there in your never-failing band?" "For all purposes save those of attack and defence there are fifteen score of the best and bravest, as their pay-sheets well attest," was the confident response. "In a strictly literal sense, however, there are no more than can be seen on a mist-enshrouded day with a resolutely closed eye."
Awareness | Body | Death | Dreams | Fate | Knowledge | Man | Nature | Order | Will | World | Fate | Awareness |