James Agee Quotes

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause.

In my own mind, I was sort of a desperate kid.

I'm constantly tortured, and that's why I say happiness is irrelevant. Happiness is for children and yuppies.

Behind me the branches of a wasted and sterile existence are cracking.

There was three or four years of my life where I hated myself and you know, would have quite happily ended it.

When you get to that point where you don't want to live, and you don't want to die, it's a desperate, horrible place to be. And I just hit my knees. And I had to use 'The Passion of the Christ' to heal my wounds.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

Sometimes I only succeed in beating myself to death.

I cried like a baby. When no one could see me or hear me. Not because I feared what cancer would do, but because I didn't want the disease. I wanted my life to be normal, which it could no longer be.

I have seen things in my life that have broken me in spirit.

Depression is so treacherous - it can be so alluring as well as punishing. After all, it's yours and yours alone - no one else can interfere with it.

It got to a point where I didn't care if I lived or I died.

If a documentary crew were to follow me around, they'd probably think they were making a film about the saddest person in the world.

From January to December of 2019, I crumbled, to be real, and I think by the end of 2019 I had beaten myself up in every possible way to the point where I wasn't even a person. I was fully at rock bottom.

No one alive is more tormented nor weaker than myself.

1967 was the bleakest, darkest, most emotional period of my life.

I pull my lower lip all the way in between my teeth. If I try hard enough, maybe I can gobble my whole self this way.... I didn't try hard enough to swallow myself.

I mean it. Like, people always talk about how God doesn’t ever give you more than you can handle, but I’m telling you right now, I cannot handle this. This is just too much!

How could you not want to draw breath one more day? How could your own life be such a cheap commodity? But then I started to understand: when your existence is hell, death must be heaven.

I don't think you're human unless you go through some [self-destructi on].

I am truly miserable - more so than I like to acknowledge to myself. Pride refuses to aid me. It has brought me into the scrape, and will not help me out of it.

Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.

Despair doth strike as deep a furrow in the brain as mischief or remorse.

My greatest affliction... is perhaps the major theme of my writings, the affliction of loneliness that follows me like a shadow, a very ponderous shadow too heavy to drag after me all of my days and nights.