Quotes by James Agee
Several tons of dynamite are set off in this picture - none of it under the right people.
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.
This continent, an open palm spread frank before the sky.
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.
Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.
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.
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.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.
It seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying, that it could occur to an association of human beings drawn together through need and chance and for profit into a company, an organ of journalism, to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of
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...
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.
God doesn't believe in the easy way.
The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes.
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.
