James Agee Short Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Agee
Most movies are like predigested food because they are mere reenactments of something that happened (if ever) back in the scripting stage.

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
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
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
Isn't every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn't there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?

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
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
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
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