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
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.
Children |
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
And God said, "Have you read the specs on this order?" She has to be completely washable, but not plastic. Have 180 moveable parts...all replaceable. Run on black coffee and leftovers. Have a lap that disappears when she stands up. A kiss that can cure anything from a broken leg to a disappointed love affair. And six pairs of hands."
Children |
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
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
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
Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.
Children |
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.
We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get to their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority-it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are-only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional break-through only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself.
Belief | Children | Meaning | Power | Reason | Wonder | World |
And so the arrival at new possibility, at new reality, by the deÂstruction of the self through facing up to the anxiety of the terror of existence. The self must be destroyed, brought down to nothing, in order for self-transcendence to begin. Then the self can begin to relate itself to powers beyond itself. It has to thrash around in its finitude, it has to "die," in order to question that finitude, in order to see beyond it. To what? Kierkegaard answers: to infinitude, to absolute transcendence, to the Ultimate Power of Creation which made finite creatures. Our modern understanding of psycho-dynamics confirms that this progression is very logical: if you admit that you are a creature, you accomplish one basic thing: you demolish all your unconscious power linkages or supports. As we saw in the last chapter—and it is worth repeating here—each child grounds himself in some power that transcends him. Usually it is a combination of his parents, his social group, and the symbols of his society and nation. This is the unthinking web of support which allows him to believe in himself, as he functions on the automatic security of delegated powers. He doesn't of course admit to himself that he lives on borrowed powers, as that would lead him to quesÂtion his own secure action, the very confidence that he needs. He has denied his creatureliness precisely by imagining that he has secure power, and this secure power has been tapped by unconsciously leaning on the persons and things of his society. Once you expose the basic weakness and emptiness of the person, his helpÂlessness, then you are forced to re-examine the whole problem of power linkages. You have to think about reforging them to a real source of creative and generative power. It is at this point that one can begin to posit creatureliness vis-a-vis a Creator who is the First Cause of all created things, not merely the second-hand, interÂmediate creators of society, the parents and the panoply of cultural heroes. These are the social and cultural progenitors who themÂselves have been caused, who themselves are embedded in a web of someone else's powers.
Children | Justify | Object | Rivalry | World | Worth | Value |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.