Time & Perspective Quote by Erma Bombeck

Dreams, in Erma Bombeck's hands, are not gauzy inspirations; they're property. "Only one owner at a time" turns aspiration into something almost legalistic, a deed you can't co-sign. The joke lands softly, but it's sharp: even the people who love you can't fully occupy the private, irrational real estate of what you want. Bombeck spent a career making domestic life legible and funny, and that background matters here. She's writing against the cultural script that treats family, partnership, and community as automatic antidotes to isolation. You can be surrounded by kids, coworkers, neighbors, and still be alone with the thing that actually drives you.

The subtext is a quiet defense of inner life. Dreams are lonely not because dreamers are antisocial, but because dreaming demands a kind of unilateral belief before there's proof. Shared plans get nicknames ("our future", "our move", "our savings"); dreams resist pluralization until they're funded, scheduled, validated. Until then they're awkward at the dinner table: too big, too impractical, too revealing. Calling dreams "owned" also hints at risk. Owners are responsible. If the dream collapses, it's not "us" who failed, it's you.

Bombeck's line works because it refuses the inspirational poster tone. It makes loneliness a structural feature of ambition, not a personal defect, and it offers a sly consolation: if you're lonely, you might be early.