Jean Toomer > Quotes

“Men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“We do not posses imagination enough to sense what we are missing.”
― Jean Toomer

“Thank everyone who calls out your faults, your anger, your impatience, your egotism; do this consciously, voluntarily.”
― Jean Toomer

“We learn the rope of life by untying its knots.”
― Jean Toomer

“Her Lips Are Copper Wire”

whisper of yellow globes
gleaming on lamp posts that sway
like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog

and let your breath be moist against me
like bright beads on yellow globes

telephone the power-house
that the main wires are insulate

(her words play up and down
dewy corridors of billboards)

then with your tongue remove the tape
and press your lips to mine
till they are incandescent”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“Happy, Muriel? No, not happy. Your aim is wrong. There is no such thing as happiness. Life bends joy and pain, beauty and ugliness, in such a way that no one may isolate them. No one should want to. Perfect joy, or perfect pain, with no contrasting element to define them, would mean a monotony of consciousness, would mean death.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“Acceptance of prevailing standards often means we have no standards of our own.”
― Jean Toomer

“Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“If you have heard a Jewish cantor sing, if he has touched you and made your own sorrow seem trivial when compared with his, you will know my feeling when I follow the curves of her profile, like mobile rivers, to their common delta.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“Talk about it only enough to do it. Dream about it only enough to feel it. Think about it only enough to understand it. Contemplate it only enough to be it.”
― Jean Toomer

“Whats beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you?”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“Storm Ending

Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads,
Great, hollow, bell-like flowers,
Rumbling in the wind,
Stretching clappers to strike our ears . . .
Full-lipped flowers
Bitten by the sun
Bleeding rain
Dripping rain like golden honey—
And the sweet earth flying from the thunder.”
― Jean Toomer

“The Gods Are Here"

This is no mountain
But a house,
No rock of solitude
But a family chair,
No wilds
But life appearing
As life anywhere domesticated,
Yet I know the gods are here,
And that if I touch them
I will arise
And take majesty into the kitchen.”
― Jean Toomer

“Night winds in Georgia are vagrant poets, whispering.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“Beehive"

Within this black hive to-night
There swarm a million bees;
Bees passing in and out the moon,
Bees escaping out the moon,
Bees returning through the moon,
Silver bees intently buzzing,
Silver honey dripping from the swarm of bees.
Earth is a waxen cell of the world comb,
And I, a drone,
Lying on my back,
Lipping honey,
Getting drunk with silver honey,
Wish that I might fly out past the moon
And curl forever in some far-off farmyard flower.”
― Jean Toomer

“I am of no particular race. I am of the human race, a man at large in the human world, preparing a new race.

I am of no specific region. I am of earth.

I am of no particular class. I am of the human class, preparing a new class.

I am neither male nor female nor in-between. I am of sex, with male differentiations.

I am of no special field. I am of the field of being.”
― Jean Toomer, Essentials

“You are the most sleepiest man I ever seed.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“There is no such thing as happiness. Life bends joy and pain, beauty and ugliness, in such a way that no one may isolate them.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“Dusk, suggesting the almost imperceptible posession of giant trees, settled with a purple haze about the cane. I felt strange, as I always do in Georgia, particularly at dusk. I felt that things unseen to men were tangibly immediate. It would not have surprised me had I had a vision.”
― Jean Toomer

“The earth, to man, is an infected planet.

The human world wants to hear what is wrong with it.

It is satisfied with the diagnosis.

It does not want to make effort attempting a basic cure.

Man has a stubborn will to circulate poison.”
― Jean Toomer, Essentials

“But words is like th spots on dice: no matter how y fumbles em, there's times when they jes wont come.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“In my body were many bloods, some dark blood, all blended in the fire of six or more generations. I was, then, either a new type of man or the very oldest. In any case I was inescapably myself. . . . If I achieved greatness of human stature, then just to the degree that I did I would justify all the blood in me. If I proved worthless, then I would betray all. In my own mind I could not see the dark blood as something quite different and apart. But if people wanted to say this dark blood was Negro blood and if they then wanted to call me a Negro - this was up to them. Fourteen years of my life I had lived in the white group, four years I had lived in the colored group. In my experience there had been no main difference between the two. But if people wanted to isolate and fasten on those four years and to say that therefore I was colored, this too was up to them. . . .I determined what I would do. To my real friends of both groups, I would, at the right time, voluntarily define my position. As for people at large, naturally I would go my way and say nothing unless the question was raised. If raised, I would meet it squarely, going into as much detail as seemed desirable for the occasion. Or again, if it was not the person's business I would either tell him nothing or the first nonsense that came into my head.”
― Jean Toomer

“Her own glowing is too rich a thing to let her feel the slimness of his diluted passion.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“Her mind is a pink mesh-bag filled with baby toes.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“Men had always wanted her, this Karintha, even as a child, Karintha carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“Her body was tortured with something it could not let out.”
― Jean Toomer

“As you know, men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“Her eyes, unusually weird and open, held me. Held God. He flowed in as I've seen the countryside flow in. Seen men. .... She sprang up. .... Fell to her knees, and began swaying, swaying. Her body was tortured with something it could not let out. Like boiling sap it flooded arms and fingers till she shook them as if it burned her. It found her throat, and spattered inarticulately in plaintive, convulsive sounds, mingled with calls to Christ Jesus. And then she sang, brokenly. ... A child's voice, uncertain, ... It seemed to me as though she were pounding her head in anguish upon the ground.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“Once I saw large waves
Crested with white-caps;
A driving wind
Transformed the caps
Into scudding spray.
"Swift souls," I addressed them—
They turned towards me
Startled
Sea-descending faces;
But I, not they,
Felt the pang of transience.”
― Jean Toomer

“I like to feel that something deep in me responded to the trees, the young trees that whinnied like colts impatient to be let free…”
― Jean Toomer, Cane