Frank McCourt Quotes
-
He says, You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can't make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. You might be poor , your shoes might be broken , but your mind is a palace.
→ -
Where did I get the nerve to think I could handle American teenagers? Ignorance. That's where I got the nerve.
→ -
They all went into the bar business. Which was a mistake, because they began to sip at the merchandise and it set them back, set us all back. Well, them more than I.
→ -
There are so many ways of saying Hi. Hiss it, trill it, bark it, sing it, bellow it, laugh it, cough it. A simple stroll in the hallway calls for paragraphs, sentences in your head, decisions galore.
→ -
You never know when you might come home and find Mam sitting by the fire chatting with a woman and a child, strangers. Always a woman and child. Mam finds them wandering the streets and if they ask, Could you spare a few pennies, miss? her heart breaks. She never has money so she invites them home for tea and a bit of fried bread and if it's a bad night she'll let them sleep by the fire on a pile of rags in the corner. The bread she gives them always means less for us and if we complain she says there are always people worse off and we can surely spare a little from what we have.
→ -
Love her as in childhood Through feeble, old and grey. For you’ll never miss a mother’s love Till she’s buried beneath the clay.
→ -
I say, Billy, what’s the use in playing croquet when you’re doomed? He says, Frankie, what’s the use of not playing croquet when you’re doomed?
→ -
Stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it.
→ -
First of all there is always that artistic challenge of creating something. Or the particular experience to take slum life in that period and make something out of it in the form of a book. And then I felt some kind of responsibility to my family.
→ -
The happy childhood is hardly worth your while.
→ -
I admire certain priests and nuns who go off on their own and do God's work on their own, who help in the ghettos, but as far as the institution of the church is concerned, I think it is despicable.
→ -
There’s no use saying anything in the schoolyard because there’s always someone with an answer and there’s nothing you can do but punch them in the nose and if you were to punch everyone who has an answer you’d be punching morning noon and night.
→ -
I had to get rid of any idea of hell or any idea of the afterlife. That's what held me, kept me down. So now I just have nothing but contempt for the institution of the church.
→ -
There's nothing sillier in the world than a teacher telling you don't do it after you already did it.
→ -
I appealed to my mother. I told her it wasn't fair the way the whole family was invading my dreams and she said, Arrah, for the love o' God, drink your tea and go to school and stop tormenting us with your dreams.
→ -
My childhood here... was very limited. So it was a long, long time before I actually went out to Brooklyn.
→ -
I know that big people don't like questions from children. They can ask all the questions they like, How's school? Are you a good boy? Did you say your prayers? but if you ask them did they say their prayers you might be hit on the head.
→ -
I don't believe in happiness anyway... it's too much of an American pastime, this search for happiness. Just forget happiness and enjoy your misery.
→ -
The master says it's a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it's a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there's anyone in the world who would like us to live. My brothers are dead and my sister is dead and I wonder if they died for Ireland or for the Faith. Dad says they were too young to die for anything. Mam says it was disease and starvation and him never having a job. Dad says, Och, Angela, puts on his cap, and goes for a long walk.
→ -
He sits in an old armchair in the corner covered with bits of blankets and a bucket behind the chair that stinks enough to make you sick and when you look at that old man in the dark corner you want to get a hose with hot water and strip him and wash him down and give him a big feed of rashers and eggs and mashed potatoes with loads of butter and salt and onions.I want to take the man from the Boer War and the pile of rags in the bed and put them in a big sunny house in the country with birds chirping away outside the window and a stream gurgling.
→ -
It's not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you'd wonder how they'd get along if someone hadn't invented the hyphen
→ -
Andy says, I don't understand how they can give loans to people who want to spend two weeks lying on the sand at the goddam Jersey shore and then turn down a woman with three kids hanging on by her fingernails.
→ -
I just have to proceed as usual. No matter what happens, nothing helps with the writing of the next book.
→ -
Happiness is hard to recall. Its just a glow.
→ -
I am teaching. Storytelling is teaching
→ -
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, it's been a minute since my last confession.
→ -
People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying school masters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years. Above all -- we were wet.
→ -
Oh, God above, if heaven has a taste it must be an egg with butter and salt, and after the egg is there anything in the world lovelier than fresh warm bread and a mug of sweet golden tea?
→ -
The main thing I am interested in is my experience as a teacher.
→ -
I'm more interested in writing than in performing.
→
Related Authors
-
Khaled Hosseini Novelist -
Alan Parker Film director -
Robert Carlyle Actor -
Isabel Allende Writer -
Malachy McCourt Actor -
Lena Horne Singer -
Toni Morrison Novelist -
Thomas Friedman Journalist -
Jonathan Safran Foer Writer -
John Towner Williams Film Score Composer -
Robert Fulghum Author -
Johnny Cash Singer-songwriter -
Dave Pelzer Author -
Theo Colborn Professor -
Maureen Dowd Columnist -
Roddy Doyle Novelist -
Mary Karr Poet -
Jeannette Walls Writer -
Mahbod Seraji Author -
Emily Watson Actress