James Agee Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes.

James Agee
Several tons of dynamite are set off in this picture [Tycoon]; none of it under the right people.

James Agee
We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.

James Agee
I believe that every human being is potentially capable within his 'limits' of fully 'realizing' his potentialities; that this, his being cheated and choked of it, is infinitely the ghastliest, commonest, and most inclusive of all the crimes of which the human world can assure itself.

James Agee
He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things: a one-track mind near the track's end of pure insanity; mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being can get and still be alive...

James Agee
And a human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea.

James Agee
Nature, Mr Allnutt, is what we are put into this world to rise above.

James Agee
In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again.

James Agee
The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can strike is to do fury honor.... Official acceptance is the one unmistakable symptom that salvation is beaten again, and is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas.

James Agee
As a whole part of "psychological education" it needs to be remembered that a neurosis can be valuable; also that "adjustment" to a sick and insane environment is of itself not "health" but sickness and insanity.

James Agee
If I could do it, I'd do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement.... A piece of the body torn out by the root might be more to the point.

James Agee
You've got to bear it in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or any regard for justice.

James Agee
Children, taught either years beneath their intelligence or miles wide of relevance to it, or both: their intelligence becomes hopelessly bewildered, drawn off its centers, bored, or atrophied.

James Agee
I'll do what little I can in writing. Only it will be very little. I'm not capable of it; and if I were, you would not go near it at all. For if you did, you would hardly bear to live

James Agee
And no matter what, there's not one thing in this world *or* the next that we can do or hope or guess at or wish or pray that can change it or help it one iota. Because whatever is, is. That's all. And all there is now is to be ready for it, strong enough for it, whatever it may be. That's all. That's all that matters. It's all that matters because it's all that's possible.

James Agee
Some people get where they hope to in this world. Most of us don't.

James Agee
Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put into this world to rise above.

James Agee
It is probably well on the conservative side to estimate that during the past ten to fifteen years the camera has destroyed a thousand pairs of eyes, corrupted ten thousand, and seriously deceived a hundred thousand, for every one pair that it has opened, and taught.

James Agee
The artist's task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual reality. (On photographs by Helen Levitt)

James Agee
Understanding, and action proceeding from understanding and guided by it, is one weapon against the world's bombardment, the one medicine, the one instrument by which liberty, health, and joy may be shaped... in the individual, and in the race.

James Agee
I want my vocabulary to have a very large range, but the words must be alive.

James Agee
The camera is just a machine, which records with impressive and as a rule very cruel faithfulness.

James Agee
Well, now, some people learn a little quicker than others. It's nice to learn fast but it's nice to take your time too.

James Agee
When he ran from a cop, his transitions from accelerating walk to easy jog trot to brisk canter to headlong gallop to flogged-piston sprint... were as distinct and as soberly in order as an automatic gearshift.

James Agee
All of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is

James Agee