James Agee
Novelist
1909-11-27
Quotes by James Agee
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You never live an inch without involvement and hurting people and fucking yourself everlastingly.
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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.
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...and gentle happy and peaceful, tasting the mean goodness of their living like the last of their suppers in their mouths.
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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.
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God doesn't believe in the easy way.
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God doesn't believe in the easy way.
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You never live an inch without involvement and hurting people and fucking yourself everlastingly.
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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.
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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.
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...and gentle happy and peaceful, tasting the mean goodness of their living like the last of their suppers in their mouths.
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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.
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The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes.
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She wears a slip beneath this dress but the materials of both are so thin that her dark sweated nipples are stuck to them and show through, and it is at her nipples, mainly, that the men keep looking.
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Seems as unfounded ... to say there isn't a God as to say there is.
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She's entirely devoid of the affected squawk and squeals and shiverings which ruin most girls-and the consequent vacuum is not filled by hot air, but by unobstreperous intelligence, tinged with a charming limeadish sarcasm.
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The graveyard is about fifty by a hundred yards inside a wire fence. There are almost no trees in it: a lemon verbena and a small magnolia; it is all red clay and very few weeds.
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New Orleans is stirring, rattling, and sliding faintly in its fragrance and in the enormous richness of its lust; taxis are still parked along Dauphine Street and the breastlike, floral air is itchy with the stilletos and embroiderings above black blood drumthroes of an eloquent cracked indiscoverable cornet, which exists only in the imagination and somewhere in the past, in the broken heart of Louis Armstrong; yet even in that small portion which is the infested genitals of that city, never free, neither of desire nor of waking pain, there are the qualities of the tender desolations of profoundest night.
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Of those that are drawn away, each is drawn elsewhere toward another: once more a man and a woman, in a loneliness they are not liable at that time to notice, are tightened together upon a bed: and another family has begun.
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I prefer a little free speech to no free speech at all; but how many have free speech or the chance or the mind for it; and is not free speech here as elsewhere clamped down on in ratio of its freedom and danger?
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God-doesn't-believe-in-the-easy-way.
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