Erma Louise Bombeck:
(née Fiste; February 21, 1927 – April 22, 1996).
American humorist who achieved great popularity for her newspaper humor column describing suburban home life, syndicated from 1965 to 1996. Fifteen books of her humor have been published; most became bestsellers.
Between 1965 and April 17, 1996 – five days before her death – Bombeck wrote over four thousand newspaper columns, using broad and sometimes eloquent humor, chronicling the ordinary life of a Midwestern suburban housewife. By the 1970s, her columns were read semi-weekly by 30 million readers of the nine hundred newspapers in the United States and Canada. Her work stands as a humorous chronicle of middle-class life in America after World War II, among the generation of parents who produced the Baby Boomers.
What we’re really talking about is a wonderful day set aside on the fourth Thursday of November when no one diets. I mean, why else would they call it Thanksgiving?
Worrying is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere.
The quote is a vivid metaphor for ‘unproductive anxiety’. A rocking chair is always in motion — back and forth, back and forth — yet it never actually goes anywhere. Worry works the same way: it feels like ‘doing something’ (your mind is active, engaged, churning), but it produces no forward movement, no solutions, no change. The image lands so well because the rocking chair’s rhythm also mirrors the loop of anxious thinking — the endless back-and-forth of “what if.”
Disputed Origin:
The authorship is genuinely murky, and it has been attributed to several different people:
– Erma Bombeck — It’s most commonly attributed to Erma Bombeck, the legendary humorist and newspaper columnist. This attribution is considered the most credible by many.
– Glenn Turner — Many quote databases like Goodreads and BrainyQuote attribute it to Glenn Turner, a motivational speaker and entrepreneur.
– Van Wilder (the movie) — The 2002 film ‘Van Wilder’ popularized the line for younger generations, though the screenwriters didn’t coin it — the film merely introduced it to a new audience.
– Gypsy Rose Lee also appears in at least one collection with a variation: “Praying is like a rocking chair — it’ll give you something to do, but it won’t get you anywhere.”
William Faulkner doesn’t appear in any credible attribution trail for this quote. It’s a very common phenomenon for memorable sayings to migrate to famous names (Twain, Churchill, Einstein, etc.) over time.
Bottom Line:
The quote is most plausibly from Erma Bombeck, with Glenn Turner as a secondary candidate. Like many viral bits of wisdom, it’s been echoed and re-attributed so many times that pinning down a definitive source is difficult. Faulkner almost certainly didn’t say it.
