Quotes by James Agee

“The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes.”

“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.”

“It is a peculiar part of the good photographers 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.”

“Im 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“God doesnt believe in the easy way.”

“Understanding, and action proceeding from understanding and guided by it, is one weapon against the worlds bombardment, the one medicine, the one instrument by which liberty, health, and joy may be shaped . . . in the individual, and in the race.”

“You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.”

“At forty-two I decided to become a photographer because it offered a means of creative thought and action. I didnt rationalize this, I just felt it intuitively and followed my intuition, which I have never regretted.”

“Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.”

“I try to photograph peoples spirits and thoughts. As to the soul-taking by the photographer, I dont feel I take away, but rather that the sitter and I give to each other. It becomes an act of mutual participation.”

“Its weird that photographers spend years or even a whole lifetime, trying to capture moments that added together, dont even amount to a couple of hours.”

God doesnt believe in the easy way.

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.

...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.

...and gentle happy and peaceful, tasting the mean goodness of their living like the last of their suppers in their mouths.

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.

You never live an inch without involvement and hurting people and fucking yourself everlastingly.