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 youβve 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.
There's a thin line between to laugh with and to laugh at.
But then you turn 30. Oooohh, what happened there? Makes you sound like bad milk! He TURNED; we had to throw him out. There's no fun now, you're Just a sour-dumpling. What's wrong? What's changed?
I'm a precrastinator. Yes, that's an actual term. You know that panic you feel a few hours before a big deadline when you haven't done anything yet? I just feel that a few months ahead of time.
Nobody gave me what I wanted for my birthday! Nobody! What sort of presents do you call these? New shoes, a green sweater and a bunch of stupid toys!" "What were you expecting?" "Real estate!
Isn't beer the holy libation of sincerity? The potion that dispels all hypocrisy, any charade of fine manners? The drink that does nothing worse than incite its fans to urinate in all innocence, to gain weight in all frankness?
Jack Benny was, without a doubt, the bravest comedian I have ever seen work. He wasn't afraid of silence. He would take as long as it took to tell the story.
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