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Cane QUOTES

Cane QUOTES

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

― Jean Toomer , Cane

2 " 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

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

― Jean Toomer , Cane

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " Whats beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you? "

― Jean Toomer , Cane

7 " You are the most sleepiest man I ever seed. "

― Jean Toomer , Cane

8 " Night winds in Georgia are vagrant poets, whispering. "

― Jean Toomer , Cane

9 " 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

10 " 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

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

― Jean Toomer , Cane

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

― Jean Toomer , Cane

13 " 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

14 " 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