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

James Agee
It is clear enough by now to most people that the camera never lies is a foolish saying. Yet it is doubtful whether most people realize how extraordinarily slippery a liar the camera is.

James Agee
It is the middle and pure height and whole of summer and a summer night, the held breath, of a planet's year; high shored sleeps the crested tide: what day of the month I do not know, which day of the week I am not sure, far less what hour of the night.

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

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
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
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 camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time.

James Agee
As small, quick, foolproof cameras became generally available, moreover, the camera has been used so much and so flabbily by so many people that it has acted as a sort of contraceptive on the ability to see.

James Agee
Of those that are drawn away, each is drawn elsewhere toward another: once more a man and a woman, in a loneliness they are not liable at that time to notice, are tightened together upon a bed: and another family has begun.

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
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
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
All over Alabama the lamps are out. Every leaf drenches the touch; the spider's net is heavy. The roads lie there with nothing to use them. The fields lie there, with nothing at work in them, neither man nor beast.

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

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
By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.

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
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
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