Top 69 Agee Quotes
#2. It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.
P.G. Wodehouse
#3. Agee wrote like someone who had not just viewed the movie but been in it - out with it, as if it were a girl; drinking with it; driving in the night with it.
David Thomson
#4. When I was twelve, I started reading Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee, and - do we dare breathe the name - William Faulkner.
Frances Mayes
#5. Some people get where they hope to in this world. Most of us don't.
James Agee
#6. But what counter-insurgency really comes down to is the protection of the capitalists back in America, their property and their privileges. U.S. national security, as preached by U.S. leaders, is the security of the capitalist class in the US, not the security of the rest of the people.
Philip Agee
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.
James Agee
#10. There's a lot of true things that happen in our life. I think we see them at the very moment they happen too, then we try to forget about them.
Jonis Agee
#11. You get so used to lying that after a while it's hard to remember what the truth is.
Philip Agee
#12. What the Agency [CIA] does is ordered by the President and the NSC [National Security Council]. The Agency neither makes decisions on policy nor acts on its own account. It is an instrument of the President.
Philip Agee
#13. A girl's brain is mysterious, but only in a superficial way-a way very exasperating to me.
James Agee
#14. Eva, can I pose as Aesop in a cave?"
No, Don.
Jon Agee
#15. God doesn't believe in the easy way.
James Agee
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. This continent, an open palm spread frank before the sky.
James Agee
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Seems as unfounded ... to say there isn't a God as to say there is.
James Agee
#22. She blew in like a hard west wind, the kind that dropped a man's bones to zero, froze his hair to his skull, and clogged his eyes with ice.
Jonis Agee
#23. 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
#24. Marian Palaia is a writer of startling grace and sensuous lyricism - reading her, you feel as if you've never heard language this beautiful and this true.
Jonis Agee
#25. This novel has it all
mystery, psychological insight, emotional truth, and
most important
characters whose lives matter. You'll fall in love with these families. Solti writes with such passion it is inescapable, lyrical, and profoundly moving. The Forgetting Tree goes on my top ten list.
Jonis Agee
#26. Drama is a gun that doesn't go off.
Jonis Agee
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. From the opening lines, Sleeping with Schubert is a hilarious, whimsical romp through the looking glass of a great musical mystery. The writing snaps, crackles, and pops with humor as Bonnie Marson makes Schubert a sexy, happening kind of guy who gives new meaning to our dreaming the impossible.
Jonis Agee
#30. You never live an inch without involvement and hurting people and fucking yourself everlastingly.
James Agee
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. God is not here, Hannah said to herself; and made a small cross upon her breastbone, against her blasphemy.
James Agee
#36. Women have for centuries been recognized as talented listeners, nurturers, motivators, excellent communicators. These very qualities that we once were told were unbusinesslike are precisely the qualities that business needs most to tap human potential.
Mary Cunningham Agee
#37. Play the age as comedy if you want to get away with murder.
James Agee
#38. In Business School they taught us about cash flow, not about corporate politics; about return on equity, not about egos and pride. Oh, there were optional courses on 'Organizational Behavior' and 'Managerial Skills,' but these were a little too bloodless to convey what I learned on the job.
Mary Cunningham Agee
#39. The camera is just a machine, which records with impressive and as a rule very cruel faithfulness.
James Agee
#40. 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
#41. But when you make love, the dead stay close, fill the bed, lie along the bodies in tiers, sandwiching all their lives with yours.
Jonis Agee
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. for the other sort of intimate acquaintance,
James Agee
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. We all need the waters of the Mercy River. Though they don't run deep, there's usually enough, just enough, for the extravagance of our lives.
Jonis Agee
#48. All of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is
James Agee
#49. 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
#50. If people are worried about unfair advancement, they should look at the sons-in-law of the world running companies. They've truly slept their way to the top.
Mary Cunningham Agee
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes.
James Agee
#55. 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
#56. I know I am making the choice most dangerous to an artist in valuing life above art,
James Agee
#57. Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we were put in this world to rise above.
James Agee
#58. In this astonishing novel Amirrezvani reminds us what all human hearts suffer and dare. Equal of the Sun is an irresistible novel.
Jonis Agee
#59. 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
#60. Several tons of dynamite are set off in this picture - none of it under the right people.
James Agee
#61. The camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time.
James Agee
#62. 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
#63. ...and gentle happy and peaceful, tasting the mean goodness of their living like the last of their suppers in their mouths.
James Agee
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. The goal is the same: life itself; and the price is the same; life itself.
James Agee
#68. I feel as I were disintegrating and "growing up", whatever that means, simultaneously.
James Agee
#69. Talking to that fool is like trying to put socks on an octopus!
James Agee
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