Toomer Quotes & Sayings

For several years, while I searched for, found, and studied black women writers, I deliberately shut O'Connor out, feeling almost ashamed that she had reached me first. And yet, even when I no longer read her, I missed her, and realized that though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin to feel well read at all. — Alice Walker

The only way to seek God is to seek God first. Deny the nayward, affirm the yeaward, be true to those stirrings and motions which He starts in us, refuse priority to all else, and be faithful to the sacred. — Jean Toomer

We do not posses imagination enough to sense what we are missing. — Jean Toomer

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

I am not less poet; I am more conscious of all that I am, am not, and might become. — Jean Toomer

We start with gifts. Merit comes from what we make of them. — Jean Toomer

Whatever I believed, I did; I did with my whole heart and mind as far as possible to do so ... — Jean Toomer

Dripping rain like golden honey-
And the sweet earth flying from the thunder — Jean Toomer

O singers, resinous and soft your songsAbove the sacred whisper of the pines,Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines,Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs. — Jean Toomer

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

Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads,
Great, hollow, bell-like flowers — Jean Toomer

O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree,
So scant of grass, so profligate of pines — Jean Toomer

We learn the rope of life by untying its knots. — Jean Toomer

No eyes that have seen beauty ever lose their sight. — Jean Toomer

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

Once a man has tasted creative action, then thereafter, no matter how safely he schools himself in patience, he is restive, acutely dissatisfied with anything else. He becomes as a lover to whom abstinence is intolerable. — Jean Toomer

The realization of ignorance is the first act of knowing. — Jean Toomer

Men try to run life according to their wishes; life runs itself according to necessity. — Jean Toomer

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

Some genius of the South
With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,
Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds. — Jean Toomer

Fear is a noose that binds until it strangles. — Jean Toomer

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

Ifemelu opened her novel, Jean Toomer's Cane, and skimmed a few pages. She had been meaning to read it for a while now, and imagined she would like it since Blaine did not. A precious performance, Blaine had called it, in that gently forbearing tone he used when they talked about novels, as though he was sure that she, with a little more time and a little more wisdom, would come to accept that the novels he liked were superior, novels written by young and youngish men and packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In a sick world, it is the first duty of the artist to get well. — Jean Toomer

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

Perhaps ... our lot on the earth is to seek and to search. Now and again we find just enough to enable us to carry on. I now doubt that any of us will completely find and be found in this life. — Jean Toomer

It takes a well-spent lifetime, and perhaps more, to crystalize in us that for which we exist. — Jean Toomer

To understand a new idea, break an old habit. — Jean Toomer

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

Night winds in Georgia are vagrant poets, whispering. — Jean Toomer

People mistake their limitations for high standards. — Jean Toomer

Whats beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you? — Jean Toomer

We never know we are beings till we love. And then it is we know the powers and potentialities of human existence. — Jean Toomer

You are the most sleepiest man I ever seed. — Jean Toomer

Most novices picture themselves as masters - and are content with the picture. This is why there are so few masters. — Jean Toomer

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

Muriel seeks happiness and beauty. Dan informs her that life is a balance between the two, between suffering and laughter, beauty and ugliness. '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. Not happy, Muriel. Say that you have tried to make them CREATE. — Jean Toomer

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

One may receive the information but miss the teaching. — Jean Toomer