The Sweet Potato Queens' Book of Love: A Fallen Southern Belle's Look at Love, Life, Men, Marriage, and Being Prepared

Try to avoid getting involved with somebody who's gonna need killing before it's over. It may seem to you that that narrows the field somewhat, but be diligent.

Hate people on an individual basis only - you must actually get to know someone at least slightly before you can properly hate him or her.

If there exists in this universe anything more infuriating and crazy-making than a man, I don't know what it is, thank you, and I don't want to know.

Cheap jewelry, however, is worse than no jewelry at all, and there are very few things in life than are worse than no jewelry at all.

Always wear pretty underwear, on account of you just never know.

If some area of your life sucks - do something else. Life is too short - and too long - to spend it being miserable. Life may indeed be short but it is for a fact wide. It is high time we started settling for more.

But, if you've decided to go out on a limb and kill one, for goodness' sake, be prepared. We all read, with dismay, the sad story of a good woman wronged in south Mississippi who took that option and made a complete mess of the entire thing. See, first she shot him. Well, she saw right off the bat that that was a mistake because then she had this enormous dead body to deal with. He was every bit as much trouble to her dead as he ever had been alive, and was getting more so all the time. So then, she made another snap decision to cut him up in pieces and dispose of him a hunk at a time. More poor planning. First, she didn't have the proper carving utensils on hand and hacking him up proved to be just a major chore, plus it made just this colossal mess on her off-white shag living room carpet. It's getting to be like the Cat in the Hat now, only Thing Two ain't showing up to help with the clean-up. She finally gets him into portable-size portions, and wouldn't you know it? Cheap trash bags. Can anything else possible go wrong for this poor woman? So, the lesson here is obvious--for want of a small chain saw, a roll of Visqueen and some genuine Hefty bags, she is in Parchman Penitentiary today instead of New Orleans, where she'd planned to go with her new boyfriend. Preparation is everything.

If you are stuck sweating on a sandbar in the river of your life you've got to find a way back into those swift effervescent currents of joy that are your birthright.

Stay fit and live long and prosper, but write your own obituary now, while you can, just in case.

My sister, Judy, has always said that she would like to lie in state, propped up in her coffin with her eyes blared wide open, face fixed in a big grin, and have a taped greeting for all her mourners. Something real upbeat and, well, live-sounding, like: 'He-e-e-ey!Cuteshoestellyomamahi!

It’s vitally important that you buy your own crown and declare yourself Queen, and then spend the rest of your life living into that.

The lesson of the Funk Dog: “You can forget what it used to feel like to feel good about life; feeling rotten—or just a low-grad funk—seems normal and therefore acceptable. I just don’t believe that God intended for any of his creatures to be petted with sticks.

Be particular. That is, without a doubt, the Best Advice Ever Given in the History of the Entire World. Consider, if you will, the profound effect that following that advice would have on, say, your diet, your love life, your financial situation, your decision on whether to have that next drink. I mean, what do those two words not cover?

All of a sudden, when I take my hair down, I don’t look like a flower child anymore. I look like Loretta Lynn. This is not a good look—for Loretta or me.

The Basic Five are these: (1) a man who can fix things, (2) a man you can dance with, (3) a man who can pay for things, (4) a man you can talk to, and (5) a man to have great sex with. As I said, this is the rudimentary team you need to form, according to our sage adviser. Certainly other functions can be added to suit your more refined tastes, but with this starting lineup, you can at least avoid abject misery.

Suzanne Sugarbaker of Designing Women was so right when she said, “There’s just nothing better in life than to ride around on the back of a convertible with a crown on your head.” Words to live by.

Do not ever give a Queen a home appliance as a gift. Period. The end.

Therefore we feel it is important that our children be taught this simple tenet: Hate people on an individual basis only—you must actually get to know someone at least slightly before you can properly hate him or her.

figure that, having grown up watching me doing any number of things she considered humiliating when I was in a good mood, she was so terrified when I was in an angry one that the prospect was unthinkable to her.

If we exercise, however, we do look and feel much better in our outfits, not to mention how we look out of our outfits. And we’ve found we’re happiest when we are not too fat to walk.

All that is to say that the dark is our friend, and this is precisely what it was invented for. Most of us spend most of our time in the daylight, however, so it behooves us to get to the gym.

We both developed coughs by the end of the trip, however, and we decided it was vacation pneumonia, caused by excessive lying down. We walk a fine line, don’t you know, between a “therapeutic” dose and “overmedication.

Like all sororities, we find that half, maybe more, of the fun is in keeping others out. So much for the sweet part.

For white males, it is impossible to have tits that are too big, and for black males, you cannot get the butt big enough. At the same time, if your tits are big enough, white guys don’t care how big your butt is; and if your butt’s big enough, black guys don’t care what’s happening around front.

We have not one but two former presidents of the Junior League (we knew this about them and we still embraced them as if they were normal).