Quotes from James Agee

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know I am making the choice most dangerous to an artist in valuing life above art.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever, but will not ever tell me who I am.

But he did not ask, and his uncle did not speak except to say, after a few minutes, "It's time to go home," and all the way home they walked in silence.

If I could do it, I'd do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement…. A piece of the body torn out by the root might be more to the point.

All over Alabama the lamps are out. Every leaf drenches the touch; the spider's net is heavy. The roads lie there with nothing to use them. The fields lie there, with nothing at work in them, neither man nor beast.

Words cannot embody; they can only describe.

Several tons of dynamite are set off in this picture; none of it under the right people.

Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put into this world to rise above.

Most movies are like predigested food because they are mere reenactments of something that happened (if ever) back in the scripting stage.

A mother never realizes that her children are no longer children.

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?

Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance, and for what purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you do about it?