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The artist's task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual reality. (On photographs by Helen Levitt)

James Agee

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James Agee
Age: 45 †
Born: 1909
Born: November 27
Died: 1955
Died: May 16
Author
Autobiographer
Critic
Film Critic
Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Knoxville
Tennessee
James Rufus Agee
Rufus Agee
Eye
Aesthetic
Artist
Actual
Reality
Perceive
World
Task
Sees
Tasks
Helen
Photograph
Alter
Within
Photographs

More quotes by James Agee

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The camera is just a machine, which records with impressive and as a rule very cruel faithfulness.
James Agee
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Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.
James Agee
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Some people get where they hope to in this world. Most of us don't.
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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.
James Agee
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I believe that every human being is potentially capable within his 'limits' of fully 'realizing' his potentialities that this, his being cheated and choked of it, is infinitely the ghastliest, commonest, and most inclusive of all the crimes of which the human world can assure itself.
James Agee
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Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?
James Agee
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This continent, an open palm spread frank before the sky.
James Agee
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It is clear enough by now to most people that the camera never lies is a foolish saying. Yet it is doubtful whether most people realize how extraordinarily slippery a liar the camera is.
James Agee
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All of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is
James Agee
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I suspect the fault...is in me: that I hate any job on earth, as a job and a hindrance and a semi-suicide.
James Agee
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You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.
James Agee
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I know the most important faculty to develop is one for hard, continuous and varied work and living but the difference between knowing this and doing anything consistent about it is often abysmal.
James Agee
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One thing I feel is this: that a great deal of poetry is the product of adolescence-or of an emotionally adolescent frame of mind: and that as this state of mind changes, poetry is likely to dry up.
James Agee
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The goal is the same: life itself and the price is the same life itself.
James Agee
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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
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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
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The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes.
James Agee
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Seems as unfounded ... to say there isn't a God as to say there is.
James Agee
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I'll do what little I can in writing. Only it will be very little. I'm not capable of it and if I were, you would not go near it at all. For if you did, you would hardly bear to live
James Agee
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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