James Agee
James Agee
James Rufus Ageewas an American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family, won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth27 November 1909
CountryUnited States of America
sky palms spread
This continent, an open palm spread frank before the sky.
effort radiance consciousness
All of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is
suicide jobs hate
I suspect the fault...is in me: that I hate any job on earth, as a job and a hindrance and a semi-suicide.
summer children talking
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.
order transition cop
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.
success spunk gumption
Just spunk won't be enough; you've got to have gumption.
race medicine joy
Understanding, and action proceeding from understanding and guided by it, is one weapon against the world's bombardment, the one medicine, the one instrument by which liberty, health, and joy may be shaped . . . in the individual, and in the race.
acceptance kissing blow
The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can strike is to do fury honor. . . . Official acceptance is the one unmistakable symptom that salvation is beaten again, and is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas.
children years bored
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.
mom mother children
A mother never realizes that her children are no longer children.
summer sleep night
It is the middle and pure height and whole of summer and a summer night, the held breath, of a planet's year; high shored sleeps the crested tide: what day of the month I do not know, which day of the week I am not sure, far less what hour of the night.
stars lying winter
And somewhat as in blind night, on a mild sea, a sailor may be made aware of an iceberg, fanged and mortal, bearing invisibly near, by the unwarned charm of its breath, nothingness now revealed itself: that permanent night upon which the stars in their expiring generations are less than the glinting of gnats, and nebulae, more trivial than winter breath; that darkness in which eternity lies bent and pale, a dead snake in a jar, and infinity is the sparkling of a wren blown out to sea; that inconceivable chasm of invulnerable silence in which cataclysms of galaxies rave mute as amber.
time preparation tunes
You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.
confusion confusing volume
The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes.