“Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream.”
Jean Toomer“No eyes that have seen beauty ever lose their sight.”
Jean Toomer“We do not posses imagination enough to sense what we are missing.”
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, Cane“Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream.”
Jean Toomer, Cane“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, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose