Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
Interpretation
This quote humorously highlights the simplicity and popularity of storytelling and intimate relationships as forms of enjoyment in Southern culture.
In this quote, Robert Penn Warren suggests that storytelling and copulation are fundamental sources of entertainment in the Southern United States. He implies that both activities are not only widely enjoyed but also accessible and affordable, reflecting the cultural values of connection and expression through narratives and personal relationships.
In practice
A speaker at a southern festival shared this quote to emphasize the importance of storytelling in the local community.
...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.
Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?
So little time we live in Time,_x000D_ _x000D_ And we learn all so painfully,_x000D_ _x000D_ That we may spare this hour's term_x000D_ _x000D_ To practice for Eternity.
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
I wouldn’t mind going to jail if I had three cellmates who played bridge
And do I look like the kind of man that can be intimidated?" barked Uncle Vernon. "Well..." said Moody, pushing back his bowler hat to reveal his sinisterly revolving eye. Uncle Vernon lept backward in horror and collided painfully with a luggage trolley. "Yes, I'd have to say you do, Dursley.
Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.
The greatest comedian I've ever seen is Jack Benny. He wasn't afraid of the silences.
The New York papers have long known that no large question is ever really settled until I have been consulted.
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