James Agee Quotes

40 quotes in 734 categories

• 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… Alive
• It's kind of a test, Mary, and it's the only kind that amounts to anything. When something rotten like this happens, then you have your… Adversity
• Seems as unfounded ... to say there isn't a God as to say there is. Atheism
• 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… Another Family
• 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… All
• 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… Abysmal
• A girl's brain is mysterious, but only in a superficial way-a way very exasperating to me. Brain
• 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… Adolescence
• 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… Breath
• 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… All
• 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,… Any
• Just spunk won't be enough; you've got to have gumption. Gumption
• 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 .… Accelerating
• ...but you are too much for them: the weak in courage are strong in cunning; and one by one, you have absorbed and have captured… Absorbed
• 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… All
• Some people get where they hope to in this world. Most of us don't. Hope
• For in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned, for him who can discern it, and central and simply, without either dissection into science,… All
• And somewhat as in blind night, on a mild sea, a sailor may be made aware of an iceberg, fanged and mortal, bearing invisibly near,… Amber
• 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… Accrued
• Several tons of dynamite are set off in this picture - none of it under the right people. Dynamite

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