84 Quotes by James Agee

...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.

Begetting a child is at least as serious an act as murder...

Well we can't teach 'em, better pass 'em.Let those eradicate who canMan's inhumanity to manThrough teaching boys to kiss the Flag,Keep their rooms tidy, kick a fag,Follow the leader, mind the rules,Blunt and ignore the only toolsThat interest the half-mature.

It's hell... Just hell. It's just plain hell... But you gotta go through with it.

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.

... Play the age as comedy if you want to get away with murder.

God doesn't 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.