James Agee Quotes

40 quotes in 734 categories

• The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes.
• God doesn't believe in the easy way.
• You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.
• This continent, an open palm spread frank before the sky.
• 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.
• In every child who is born, no matter what circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again:…
• A mother never realizes that her children are no longer children.
• 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,…
• The goal is the same: life itself; and the price is the same; life itself.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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,…
• 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,…
• 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…
• I know I am making the choice most dangerous to an artist in valuing life above art,
• Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.
• 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,…
• All of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is
• 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…
• 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…

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