Top 35 James Agee Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “A mother never realizes that her children are no longer children.”

— James Agee

2. “Just spunk won’t be enough; you’ve got to have gumption.”

— James Agee

3. “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

4. “The goal is the same: life itself; and the price is the same; life itself.”

— James Agee

5. “The camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time.”

— James Agee

6. “All of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is.”

— James Agee

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.”

— James Agee

11. “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

12. “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

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. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “To come devotedly into the depths of a subject, your respect for it increasing in every step and your whole heart weakening apart with shame upon yourself in your dealing with it : To know at length better and better and at length into the bottom of your soul your unworthiness of it : Let me hope in any case that it is something to have begun to learn.”

— James Agee

18. “A girl’s brain is mysterious, but only in a superficial way-a way very exasperating to me.”

— James Agee

19. “The camera is just a machine, which records with impressive and as a rule very cruel faithfulness.”

— James Agee

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “Some people get where they hope to in this world. Most of us don’t.”

— James Agee

27. “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

28. “This continent, an open palm spread frank before the sky.”

— James Agee

29. “He always felt different once he was across the river. This was the real, old, deep country, now. Home country. The cabins looked different to him, a little older and poorer and simpler, a little more homelike; the trees and rocks seemed to come differently out of the ground; the air smelled different.”

— James Agee

30. “I feel as I were disintegrating and “growing up”, whatever that means, simultaneously.”

— James Agee

31. “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

32. “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

33. “When grief and shock surpass endurance there occur phases of exhaustion, of anesthesia in which relatively little is left and one has the illusion of recognizing, and understanding, a good deal.”

— James Agee

34. “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

35. “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

36. “By the time I left to go downtown for supper, I was at the high point just short of where intoxication begins to droop into clumsiness or melancholy; and the minute I was outdoors the streets, in the very beautiful late of afternoon weather, improved, that if it can be improved, with the feeling of being alone for a little while, and with the sharp, tender enjoyment of a city I am ordinarily tired in.”

— James Agee

37. “Little houses, bigger ones, scrolled and capacious porches, dark windows, leaves of trees already rich with May, homes of rooms which chambered sleep as honey is cherished, drifted past their slow walking and were left behind, and not a light in any home.”

— James Agee