James Agee famous quotes

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, or digestion into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiation of what is.
-- James Agee

#Art #Symphony #Effort

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, by the unwarned charm of its breath, nothingness now revealed itself: that permanent night upon which the stars in their expiring generations are less than the glinting of gnats, and nebulae, more trivial than winter breath; that darkness in which eternity lies bent and pale, a dead snake in a jar, and infinity is the sparkling of a wren blown out to sea; that inconceivable chasm of invulnerable silence in which cataclysms of galaxies rave mute as amber.
-- James Agee

#Stars #Lying #Winter

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: and in him, too, once more, and of each of us, our terrific responsibility toward human life; toward the utmost idea of goodness, of the horror of terror, and of God.
-- James Agee

#Life #Peace #Children

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

#Writing #Artist #Facts

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

#Confusion #Confusing #Volume

You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.
-- James Agee

#Time #Preparation #Tunes

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

#Children #Years #Bored

A mother never realizes that her children are no longer children.
-- James Agee

#Mom #Mother #Children

The goal is the same: life itself; and the price is the same; life itself.
-- James Agee

#Goal #Addiction

How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. So far, so much between, you can never go home again. You can go home, it's good to go home, but you never really get all the way home again in your life. ... whatever it was and however good it was, it wasn't what you once had been, and had lost, and could never have again, and once in a while, once in a long time, you remembered, and knew how far you were away, and it hit you hard enough, that little while it lasted, to break your heart.
-- James Agee

#Home #Heart #Long

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. You've got to keep your mind off pitying your own rotten luck and setting up any kind of a howl about it. You've got to remember that things as bad as this and a hell of a lot worse have happened to millions of people before and that they've come through it and that you will too.
-- James Agee

#Fall #People #Justice

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

#Fall #Vocabulary #Diction

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 liberty, health, and joy may be shaped . . . in the individual, and in the race.
-- James Agee

#Race #Medicine #Joy

I know I am making the choice most dangerous to an artist in valuing life above art,
-- James Agee

#Art #Artist #Choices

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

#Lying #Adventure #Play

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

#Order #Transition #Cop

This continent, an open palm spread frank before the sky.
-- James Agee

#Sky #Palms #Frank

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

#Summer #Children #June

...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 and dishonored, and have distilled of your deliverers the most ruinous of all poisons; people hear Beethoven in concert halls, or over a bridge game, or to relax; Cézannes are hung on walls, reproduced, in natural wood frames; van Gogh is the man who cut off his ear and whose yellows became recently popular in window decoration.
-- James Agee

#Strong #Wall #Cutting

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 or pray that can change it or help it one iota. Because whatever is, is. That's all. And all there is now is to be ready for it, strong enough for it, whatever it may be. That's all. That's all that matters. It's all that matters because it's all that's possible.
-- James Agee

#Strong #Wish #May

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

#People #World #This World

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 this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea.
-- James Agee

#Cancer #Sea #Definitions

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

#Differences #Knowing #Important

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

#Girl #Brain #Intelligence

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

#Mind #Dry #States

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

#Summer #Sleep #Night

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

#Believe #World #Limits

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

#Fall #Justice #Risk

Just spunk won't be enough; you've got to have gumption.
-- James Agee

#Success #Gumption #Enough

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

#Mind #Speech #Littles

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

#Family #Loneliness #Men

Seems as unfounded ... to say there isn't a God as to say there is.
-- James Agee

#Atheism

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 choice. You start to really be alive, or you start to die. That's all.
-- James Agee

#Adversity #Choices #Rotten

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

#Sick #Insanity #Healthy

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

#Writing #Littles #Bears

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

#Effort #Radiance #Consciousness

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, on the grass in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.
-- James Agee

#Summer #Mother #Quilts

Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.
-- James Agee

#Lying #Errors #Littles

God doesn't believe in the easy way.
-- James Agee

#Believe #Way #Belief

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

#Track #Insanity #Mind