Jill Conner Browne

“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.”

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

“What if, when you woke up in the morning, ALL you had LEFT was what you had thanked God for the night before?”

“Life. It's your birthday present. Open it up and play with it. Act like you like it. (The One who gave it to you is watching, after all. Don't want to hurt his feelings.) And if you don't like your life, CHANGE IT. It is all yours.”

“A stranger came to their door one day. He was singularly unattractive - very little hair covering his hideous, sore-wracked skin, just generally ratty and nasty looking. But as is often said of the unbeautiful of the world, he had a great personality. He came to be known a "Funkdog", because he was, in fact, a dog, and he was funky. And so they started this thing of petting Funkdog with a small stick. That image always just made me want to bawl, and now I know why. I think Funkdog being petted with a stick is a perfect metaphor for what can happen to any of us in this life if we don't pay attention. In any area of our lives, things can go from great to not so hot, to downright unspeakable, and do it so gradually that we keep downshifting our expectations to correspond with our current situation. We settle for less and less and tell ourselves,"It's not so bad", until one day we wake up and we are in effect, hairless and scabby, and just hoping to get petted with a stick for a little while.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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!”

“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.”

“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.”

“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. ”

“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. ”

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