James Agee, quotes

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

Movies are made for respectable people now. (They) were better when made for lowbrows and made with instinct and delight

We’re regular meat eaters. No knickknacks, no borl nothn. Give me meat and biscuit three times a day year round and I’ll lof for ye ever day the sun shines.

I’d do anything on earth to become a really great writer. That’s as sincere a thing as I’ve ever said.

He felt that although his father loved their home and loved all of them, he was more lonely than the contentment of this family love could help; that it even increased his loneliness, or made it hard for him not to be lonely.

Poverty caused their carelessness; their carelessness brings them deeper poverty.

Any definitive mystery is interesting to speculate over, and thoroughly useless to.

His eyes are a clear, ignorant, and somewhere dangerous yellow, quietly studying you.

Human life, we must assume in the first place, is somewhat more important than anything else in human life, except, possibly, what happens to it.

He cries a great deal of the time: so steadily that the crying goes unnoticed, as would the habituate noise of a nearby waterfall.

She thought that she had never before had a chance to realize the strength that human beings have, to endure.

Like many people who cannot read or write he handles words with a clumsy economy and beauty, as if they were farm animals drawing open difficult land.

I hear my father and my mother and they are my giants, my king and my queen, beside whom there are no others so wise and worthy or honorable or brave or beautiful in this world.