James Agee Quotes

#1. One thing I feel is this: that a great deal of poetry is the product of adolescence-or of an emotionally adolescent frame of mind: and that as this state of mind changes, poetry is likely to dry up.

James Agee

#2. 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

#3. I suspect the fault ... is in me: that I hate any job on earth, as a job and a hindrance and a semi-suicide.

James Agee

#4. 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

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

James Agee

#6. Play the age as comedy if you want to get away with murder.

James Agee

#7. I prefer a little free speech to no free speech at all; but how many have free speech or the chance or the mind for it; and is not free speech here as elsewhere clamped down on in ratio of its freedom and danger?

James Agee

#8. for the other sort of intimate acquaintance,

James Agee

#9. 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

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

James Agee

#11. It is a peculiar part of the good photographer's adventure to know where luck is most likely to lie in the stream, to hook it, and to bring it in without unfair play and without too much subduing it.

James Agee

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

James Agee

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. I know I am making the choice most dangerous to an artist in valuing life above art,

James Agee

#16. Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we were put in this world to rise above.

James Agee

#17. 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

#18. Several tons of dynamite are set off in this picture - none of it under the right people.

James Agee

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

James Agee

#20. 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

#21. ...and gentle happy and peaceful, tasting the mean goodness of their living like the last of their suppers in their mouths.

James Agee

#22. 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

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

James Agee

#24. 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

#25. The goal is the same: life itself; and the price is the same; life itself.

James Agee

#26. I feel as I were disintegrating and "growing up", whatever that means, simultaneously.

James Agee

#27. Talking to that fool is like trying to put socks on an octopus!

James Agee

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

James Agee

#29. Small wonder how pitiably we love our home, cling in her skirts at night, rejoice in her wide star-seducing smile, when every star strikes us sick with the fright: do we really exist at all?

James Agee

#30. This continent, an open palm spread frank before the sky.

James Agee

#31. Now I am more nearly a grown member of the human race..she thought she had never before had a chance to realize the strength human beings have, to endure;she loved and revered all those who had ever suffered, even those who had failed to endure

James Agee

#32. 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

#33. God doesn't believe in the easy way.

James Agee

#34. A girl's brain is mysterious, but only in a superficial way-a way very exasperating to me.

James Agee

#35. You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.

James Agee

#36. Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance, and for what
purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you
do about it?

James Agee

#37. And it was respect he needed, infinitely more than love. Just not to have to worry about whether people respect you. Not ever to have to feel that people are being nice to you because they are sorry for you, or afraid of you.

James Agee

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

James Agee

#39. Seems as unfounded ... to say there isn't a God as to say there is.

James Agee

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. You never live an inch without involvement and hurting people and fucking yourself everlastingly.

James Agee

#44. I know the most important faculty to develop is one for hard, continuous and varied work and living; but the difference between knowing this and doing anything consistent about it is often abysmal.

James Agee

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. God is not here, Hannah said to herself; and made a small cross upon her breastbone, against her blasphemy.

James Agee

#49. I'm very anxious not to fall into archaism or 'literary' diction. I want my vocabulary to have a very large range, but the words must be alive.

James Agee