James Agee Quotes

We are living in a world where image-making is important, so we ignore the facts.

You can't believe everything you read in a newspaper or everything that's coming out of the president's mouth. And you can't believe when someone posts a picture from their personal life, because most of the time, it's staged - we're showing each other these idealized versions of ourselves so that we seem better and other people will feel worse.

The thing is too that when you sell people a false reality and they take that to be the norm, when that false reality is light-years from what’s really happening, that in itself is a tremendous defense mechanism because when you start talking about what is actually happening, it is so different from what people perceive to be happening. They just can’t make that jump; it’s too insane for them.

The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.

Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it; and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.

Looking at a black and white photograph, you are already looking at a strange world.

To say that "the camera cannot lie" is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.

Falsehood, like the dry-rot, flourishes the more in proportion as air and light are excluded.

The high-definition picture is still a perspective picture. That's the real problem, the perspective picture.

I suspect most self-described 18-year-old Scandinavian women named Inga who collect and wear string bikinis are, in reality, more likely to be middle-aged, pot-bellied guys named Lou who collect and wear string cheese.

Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.

We lie. That's what we do. You're selling me a line of bullshit and you want me to sell you a line of bullshit back so you can write a major line of bullshit and be paid for it.

Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction ; they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines.

A mountain still in the distance can appear as a molehill.

When God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

Oftentimes what you see cancels out what you perceive.

There once was an umpire whose vision Was cause for abuse and derision He remarked in surprise, 'Why pick on my eyes? It's my heart that dictates my decision.'

Never had there been such an opportunity for the dissemination of knowledge…. But the obverse is also true. We can have thrust upon us a false picture of reality as distorting as the trick mirrors in a Coney Island funhouse.

Slight changes simply make a blur.

Nothing is as deceptive as a photograph.

Where there's smoke, there's bound to be mirrors.

I believe in low lights and trick mirrors.

Neural scientists at M.I.T. say they can plant false memories in your brain. No, that is not new. Politicians have been doing that for years. They’re called campaign promises.