"Acceptance of prevailing standards often means we have no standards of our own.""Fear is a noose that binds until it strangles.""I am not less poet; I am more conscious of all that I am, am not, and might become.""Men try to run life according to their wishes; life runs itself according to necessity.""Most novices picture themselves as masters - and are content with the picture. This is why there are so few masters.""No eyes that have seen beauty ever lose their sight.""People mistake their limitations for high standards.""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.""The realization of ignorance is the first act of knowing."
Toomer was born Nathan Pinchback Toomer in Washington, D.C. of mixed racial and ethnic descent (Dutch, French, Native American, African-American, Welsh, German, Jewish). His parents were Nathan Toomer and Nina Pinchback. His maternal grandfather was Louisiana Governor P. B. S. Pinchback, the first African American to become Governor of a U.S. state. He spent his childhood attending both all-white and all-black segregated schools. In his early years, Toomer resisted racial classifications and wished to be identified only as an American after going to an all-black school in Washington D.C., then an all-white school in New Rochelle N.Y., then an all-black school in Washington D.C. again. Toomer attended six institutions of higher education between 1914 and 1917 (the University of Wisconsin, the Massachusetts College of Agriculture, the American College of Physical Training in Chicago, the University of Chicago, New York University, and the City College of New York) studying agriculture, fitness, biology, sociology, and history, but he never completed a degree. The readings that he would undertake and the lectures he attended during his college years shaped the direction his writing would take. After leaving college, Toomer published some short stories, devoted several months to the study of Eastern philosophies and took a job as a principal in Sparta, Georgia. The segregation Toomer experienced in the South led him to identify more strongly as an African American.
In 1923, Toomer published the High Modernist work, Cane. It is considered by many scholars to be his best work. A series of poems and short stories about the black experience in America, Cane was hailed by critics and is seen as an important work of both the Harlem Renaissance and the Lost Generation.
Toomer found it more difficult to get published throughout the 1930s, and in 1940 moved with his second wife to Doylestown, Pennsylvania where he joined the Religious Society of Friends and began to withdraw from society. Toomer wrote a small amount of fiction and published essays in Quaker publications during this time, but devoted most of his time to serving on Quaker committees. Toomer stopped writing literary works after 1950. He died in 1967 after several years of poor health.
A close and longtime friend of American painter Georgia O'Keeffe, Toomer appears as a character in the 2009 television movie Georgia O'Keeffe.
