Cane Quotes

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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“Emptiness is a thing that grows by being moved.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“The half moon is a white child who sleeps upon the treetops of the forest. - (Page 111)”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“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”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“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)”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“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)”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“Her mind is a pink meshbag filled with baby toes. - (Page 33)”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

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

“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.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane