Top 98 Frank McCourt Quotes
#1. He knows how it is to leave Ireland, did it himself and never got over it. You live in Los Angeles with sun and palm trees day in day out and you ask God if there's any chance He could give you one soft rainy Limerick day
Frank McCourt
#2. Nobody ever told them they had a right to an opinion.
Frank McCourt
#3. The sky is the limit. You never have the same experience twice.
Frank McCourt
#4. With Angela drawn to the hangdog look and Malachy lonely after three months in jail, there was bound to be a knee-trmbler.
A knee-trmbler is the act itself done up against a wall, man and woman up on their toes, straining so hard their knees tremble with the excitement that's in it.
Frank McCourt
#5. In New York, with Prohibition in full swing, he thought he had died and gone o hell for his sins. Then he discovered speakeasies and he rejoiced.
Frank McCourt
#6. 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.
Frank McCourt
#7. The happy childhood is hardly worth your while.
Frank McCourt
#8. Clarke, define resplendent. I think it's shining, sir. Pithy, Clarke, but adequate. McCourt, give us a sentence with pithy. Clarke is pithy but adequate, sir. Adroit, McCourt. You have a mind for the priesthood, my boy, or politics. Think of that.
Frank McCourt
#9. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, it's been a minute since my last confession.
Frank McCourt
#10. I felt so happy I could barely stay in my skin
Frank McCourt
#11. 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.
Frank McCourt
#12. When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
Frank McCourt
#15. We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely.
Frank McCourt
#16. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.
Frank McCourt
#17. A mother's love is a blessing
No matter where you roam.
Keep her while you have her,
You'll miss her when she's gone.
Frank McCourt
#18. He drinks his stout and laughs that there's nothing like a great bloody steak of a Friday night and if that's the worst sin he ever commits he'll float to heaven body and soul, ha ha ha.
Frank McCourt
#19. I just have to proceed as usual. No matter what happens, nothing helps with the writing of the next book.
Frank McCourt
#20. Actually, my mother and Alfie came for three weeks' Christmas vacation and stayed for 21 years. I guess my mother never went back because she was lonely.
Frank McCourt
#21. 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?
Frank McCourt
#22. 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.
Frank McCourt
#23. Your mind is a treasure house that you should stock well and it's the one part of you the world can't interfere with.
Frank McCourt
#24. Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.
Frank McCourt
#25. I'm in New York, land of the free and home of the brave, but I'm supposed to behave as if I were in Limerick at all times.
Frank McCourt
#27. It's lovely to know that the world can't interfere with the inside of your head.
Frank McCourt
#29. I had no accomplishments except surviving. But that isn't enough in the community where I came from, because everybody was doing it. So I wasn't prepared for America, where everybody is glowing with good teeth and good clothes and food.
Frank McCourt
#30. Mikey's father, champion of all pint drinkers, is like my uncle Pa Keating, he doesn't give a fiddler's fart what the world says and that's the way I'd like to be myself.
Frank McCourt
#31. I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.
Frank McCourt
#33. 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.
Frank McCourt
#34. That IS what journal writing is all about - showing ourselves to God.
Frank McCourt
#35. Teacher? I never dreamed I could rise so high in the world
Frank McCourt
#36. 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.
Frank McCourt
#38. They said her duck recipe and the Chinese music were so dramatic everything else sounded anemic.
Frank McCourt
#39. I can't go too much into my domestic life because there are ex-wives ready to do me in.
Frank McCourt
#40. I think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book.
Frank McCourt
#41. Stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it.
Frank McCourt
#42. This is the situation in the public schools of America: The farther you travel from the classroom the greater your financial and professional rewards.
Frank McCourt
#43. 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
Frank McCourt
#44. They can afford to smile because they all have teeth so dazzling if they dropped them in the snow they'd be lost forever.
Frank McCourt
#45. Just let them sit in the goddam sun. But the world won't let them because there's nothing more dangerous than letting old farts sit in the sun. They might be thinking. Same thing with kids. Keep 'em busy or they might start thinking.
Frank McCourt
#46. My childhood here ... was very limited. So it was a long, long time before I actually went out to Brooklyn.
Frank McCourt
#47. For once, mam, my bladder isn't near my eye and why isn't it?
Frank McCourt
#48. There are boys here who have to mend their shoes whatever way they can. There are boys in this class with no shoes at all. It's not their fault and it's no shame. Our Lord had no shoes. He died shoeless. Do you see Him hanging on the cross sporting shoes? Do you, boys?
Frank McCourt
#49. Samuel Beckett was saying, in a new biography, that he could remember being in the womb, which, of course, is a bit far-fetched. But he's an Irishman, so nothing's too far-fetched.
Frank McCourt
#50. I am for who i was in the beginning but now is present and i exist in the future.
Frank McCourt
#51. When I act tough they listen politely till the spasm passes. They know.
Frank McCourt
#52. You feel a sense of urgency, especially at my advanced age, when you're staring into the grave.
Frank McCourt
#53. On the Left side of the blackboard I print a capital F on the right side another capital F. I draw an arrow from left to right, from FEAR to FREEDOM.
I don't think anyone achieves complete freedom, but what I am trying to do with you is drive fear into a corner
Frank McCourt
#54. The boys from Staten Island would fill more body bags than Stuyvesant could ever imagine. Mechanics and plumbers had to fight while college students shook indignant fists, fornicated in the fields of Woodstock and sat in.
Frank McCourt
#56. There's nothing sillier in the world than a teacher telling you don't do it after you already did it.
Frank McCourt
#57. That's what he disliked about certain artists and writers. They interfered and pointed to everything as if you couldn't see it or read for yourself.
Frank McCourt
#58. 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.
Frank McCourt
#59. I asked my dad what afflicted meant and he said 'Sickness son, and things that don't fit.
Frank McCourt
#60. What are they, Dad? Cows, son. What are cows, Dad? Cows are cows, son. We
Frank McCourt
#61. 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.
Frank McCourt
#62. He came to the States in 1963, I think with a view to making up with my mother, but that didn't work. He came for three weeks, and drank his way all over Brooklyn. And went back ... I went to his funeral in Belfast.
Frank McCourt
#63. And, of course, they've always condemned dancing. You know, you might touch a member of the opposite sex. And you might get excited and you might do something natural.
Frank McCourt
#65. Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale.
Frank McCourt
#66. To enter a room is to move from one environment to another and that, for the teenager, can be traumatic. There be dragons, daily horrors from acne to zit.
Frank McCourt
#68. Shakespeare is like mashed potatoes, you can never get enough of him.
Frank McCourt
#69. I've been writing in notebooks for 40 years or so.
Frank McCourt
#70. You have to give yourself credit, not too much because that would be bragging.
Frank McCourt
#71. You can't teach in a vacuum. A good teacher relates the material to real life. You understand that, don't you?
Frank McCourt
#72. I don't know what it means and I don't care because it's Shakespeare and it's like having jewels in my mouth when I say the words.
Frank McCourt
#73. 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.
Frank McCourt
#74. Where did I get the nerve to think I could handle American teenagers? Ignorance. That's where I got the nerve.
Frank McCourt
#76. The main thing I am interested in is my experience as a teacher.
Frank McCourt
#77. I don't absolve my father completely of his responsibility for what he did to us I feel compassion, maybe. He had his demons. But I still can't understand how a man can walk away from children. And leave them to starve, as we nearly did, if it wasn't for my mother going out and begging.
Frank McCourt
#78. If ever you're getting a dog, Francis, make sure it's a Buddhist. Good-natured dogs, the Buddhists. Never, never get a Mahommedan. They'll eat you sleeping. Never a Catholic dog. They'll eat you every day including Fridays.
Frank McCourt
#79. 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.
Frank McCourt
#80. Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.
Frank McCourt
#81. There's so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd.
Frank McCourt
#82. For many writers, the journal is their opportunity to be honest with them- selves - the greatest test of all.
Frank McCourt
#84. If you were mean to your parents, they'd give you a good belt in the gob and send you flying across the room.
Frank McCourt
#85. Ooh, aren't we getting solemn, and where did I leave my soapbox? Look
Frank McCourt
#86. The English wouldn't give you the steam of their piss.
Frank McCourt
#87. Everything in my head was secondhand, too: Catholicism; Ireland's sad history, a litany of suffering and martyrdom drummed into me by priests, schoolmasters and parents who knew no better.
Frank McCourt
#88. I'm more interested in writing than in performing.
Frank McCourt
#89. I'm not one of those James Joyce intellectuals who can stand back and look at the whole edifice ... It was a slow process for me to just crawl out of it, like a snake leaving his skin behind.
Frank McCourt
#90. 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.
Frank McCourt
#91. But I don't know how I'll ever get a college degree and rise in the world with no high school diploma and eyes like piss holes in the snow, as everyone tells me.
Frank McCourt
#92. 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?
Frank McCourt
#93. I was sick of my miserable childhood, too, the way it followed me across the Atlantic and kept nagging at me to be made public.
Frank McCourt
#94. I can't go back. The past won't go away in this family ...
Frank McCourt
#95. 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.
Frank McCourt
#96. Through journal writing, you'll discover how to get more benefit from everything that you've experienced. In the process, you'll discover that what you've learned from being a survivor has enriched your life beyond anything you've ever imagined.
Frank McCourt
#97. 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.
Frank McCourt
#98. I am not living the American Dream; I am living the American fantasy.
Frank McCourt
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