"A friend will tell you she saw your old boyfriend - and he's a priest."
"A friend doesn't go on a diet because you are fat."
"Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you."
"Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?"
"All of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them."
"Anyone who watches three games of football in a row should be declared brain dead."
"Before you keep up with the Joneses, be sure they're not trying to keep up with you."
"Car designers are just going to have to come up with an automobile that oulastst the payments."
"Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it."
"Housework, if you do it right, will kill you."
"How come anything you buy will go on sale next week?"
"I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage."
"I will buy any creme, cosmetic or elixir from a woman with a European accent."
"I've exercised with women so thin that buzzards followed them to their cars."
"In two decades I've lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet."
"If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it."
"My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car."
"My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk until I faint."
"Never go to a doctor whose houseplants have died."
"Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth."
"No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is a wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick."
"Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I'm taking with me when I go."
"People shop for a bathing suit with more care than they do a husband or wife. The rules are the same. Look for something you'll feel comfortable wearing. Allow for room to grow."
"Someone once threw me a small, brown, hairy kiwi fruit, and I threw a wastebasket over it until it was dead."
"Sometimes I can't figure designers out. It's as if they flunked human anatomy."
"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."
"Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence."
"The art of never making a mistake is crucial to motherhood. To be effective and to gain the respect she needs to function, a mother must have her children believe she has never engaged in sex, never made a bad decision, never caused her own mother a moment's anxiety, and was never a child."
