Cane By Jean Toomer Quotes

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

Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream.

Whats beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you?

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.

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.

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

Night winds in Georgia are vagrant poets, whispering.

You are the most sleepiest man I ever seed.

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

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.

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.

Her own glowing is too rich a thing to let her feel the slimness of his diluted passion.

As you know, men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman.

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.

Men had always wanted her, this Karintha, even as a child, Karintha carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down.

Her mind is a pink mesh-bag filled with baby toes.

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…

This use of the vernacular became the fundamental framework for all but one of her novels and is particularly effective in her classic work Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, which is more closely related to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Jean Toomer’s Cane than to Langston Hughes’s and Richard Wright’s proletarian literature, so popular in the Depression.

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.

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. She had read many of them, because he recommended them, but they were like cotton candy that so easily evaporated from her tongue’s memory.

Up from the deep dusk of a cleared spot on the edge of the forest a mellow glow arose and spread fan-wise into the low-hanging heavens. And all around the air was heavy with the scent of boiling cane. A large pile of cane-stalks lay like ribboned shadows upon the ground. A mule, harnessed to a pole, trudged lazily round and round the pivot of the grinder. Beneath a swaying oil lamp, a Negro alternately whipped out at the mule, and fed cane-stalks to the grinder. A fat boy waddled pails of fresh ground juice between the grinder and the boiling stove. Steam came from the copper boiling pan. The scent of cane came from the copper pan and drenched the forest and the hill that sloped to factory town, beneath its fragrance. It drenched the men in circle seated around the stove. Some of them chewed at the white pulp of stalks, but there was no need for them to, if all they wanted was to taste the cane. One tasted it in factory town. And from factory town one could see the soft haze thrown by the glowing stove upon the low-hanging heavens.

A Negress chants a lullaby beneath the mate-eyes of a Southern planted. Her breasts are ample for the suckling of a song. She weans it, and sends it, curiously weaving, among lush melodies of cane and corn. Paul follows the sun into himself in Chicago. He is at Bona's window. With his own glow he looks through a dark pane.- (Page 95)

The flute is a cat that ripples its fur against the deep purring saxophone. The drum throws sticks. The jumps on the piano keyboard. Hi diddle, hi diddle, the cat and the fiddle. Crimson Gardens... hurrah!.. jumps over the moon. Crimson Gardens! Helen..O Eliza..rabbit-eyes sparkling. - (Page 101)

The flute is a cat that ripples its fur against the deep purring saxophone. The drum throws sticks. The cat jumps on the piano keyboard. Hi diddle, hi diddle, the cat and the fiddle. Crimson Gardens... hurrah!.. jumps over the moon. Crimson Gardens! Helen..O Eliza..rabbit-eyes sparkling.- (Page 101

As you know, men are apt to idolise or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman. - (Page 20)

Her mind is a pink meshbag filled with baby toes. - (Page 33)

The half moon is a white child who sleeps upon the treetops of the forest. - (Page 111)