Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer (December 26, 1894 – March 30, 1967) was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and modernism. His first book Cane, published in 1923, is considered by many to be his most significant. Of mixed race and majority European ancestry, Toomer struggled to identify as "an American" and resisted efforts to classify him as a black writer.
He continued to write poetry, short stories and essays. After his second marriage in 1934, he moved from New York to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where he became a member of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) and retired from public life. His papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.
(from Wikipedia)
“Acceptance of prevailing standards often means we have no standards of our own.”
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
“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
“زهرة قطن نوفمبرسوسة القطن في طريقها، وبرد الشتاء،أضفى على سويقات القطن لون الصدأ، كمواسم فات أوانها،والقطن، شحيح كثلج جنوبي،الغصن يتهاوى؛ رخواً شديد الذبول،لا يصلح أن يكون مجرفة لأوراق الخريف؛التربة اجتاحها القحط مسبباً بانجرافهاجفاف كل مياه السواقي؛ طيورٌ ميتةٌ وجدت في الآبار على عمق مائة قدم تحت سطح الأرضو هذا هو الفصل الذي تفتحت فيه الزهرةالدهشة أصابت كبار القوم، وسرعان ما حلوا اللغزالخرافة رأت ما لم تره من قبل قط: عيون بنية وقعت في حبها دونما وجل،حُسْنٌ لا يخطر ببال أحد في مثل ذلك الوقت من السنة.Jean Toomer1894-1967”
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
“Thank everyone who calls out your faults, your anger, your impatience, your egotism; do this consciously, voluntarily.”
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
“Her Lips Are Copper Wire”whisper of yellow globesgleaming on lamp posts that swaylike bootleg licker drinkers in the fogand let your breath be moist against melike bright beads on yellow globestelephone the power-housethat the main wires are insulate(her words play up and down dewy corridors of billboards)then with your tongue remove the tapeand press your lips to minetill they are incandescent”
Jean Toomer
“We do not posses imagination enough to sense what we are missing.”
Jean Toomer
“We learn the rope of life by untying its knots.”
Jean Toomer
“You are the most sleepiest man I ever seed.”
Jean Toomer