James Agee Quotes

James Agee was a prize-winning novelist, journalist and poet. He is perhaps best known for his autobiographical work, A Death in the Family, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. Here are a few quotes from James Agee.

• "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, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
  
  
• "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, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
  
  
• "God doesn't believe in the easy way."
  - James Agee
  
  
• "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
  
  
• "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
  
  
• "In every child who is born, under 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, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
  
  
• "Now is the night one blue dew."
  - James Agee, A Death in the Family
  
  
• "Several tons of dynamite are set off in this picture--none of it under the right people."
  - James Agee
  
  
• "The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes."
  - James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
  
  
• "This continent, an open palm spread frank before the sky."
  - James Agee
  
  
• "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
  
  
• "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
  
  
• "You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition."
  - James Agee