Frank McCourt Quotes
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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.
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I think there are two cities in the world - New York and Rome.
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You look at passers-by in Rome and think, 'Do they know what they have here?' You can say the same about Philadelphia. Do people know what went on here?
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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.
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I knew I had to find my own way of teaching.
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It gives me a very keen satisfaction that, after listening to my blather all those years, former students are now seeing that I wrote a book, that I did have it in me.
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In public schools, classes are bloated - it's ridiculous.
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At 66, you're supposed to die or get hemorrhoids.
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If ever you are to be visited by the Holy Ghost, you should make certain you're sitting beside a fireman.
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There's so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd.
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I don't know anything about a stock!
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My sister died in Brooklyn.
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Every life is a mystery. There is nobody whose life is normal and boring.
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O'Casey was writing about people in the streets and his mother and dying babies and poverty. So that astounded me because I thought you could only write about English matters.
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When I got out of the army, I had the G.I. Bill. Since I had no high school education or anything like that, I came to NYU, and they took a chance on me and let me in.
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We were below welfare. We begged from people on welfare. My father tried to repair our shoes with pieces of bicycle tires.
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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.
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Something happened when the memoirs of so-called ordinary people, like myself, suddenly hit the bestseller list.
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When I first went up to see my editor, I was with my agent, and my editor said, 'Well, what have you been doing all these years?' And my agent said, 'He's been in recovery. From his childhood.'
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The uncluttered life is the key to a good memory.
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I certainly couldn't have written 'Angela's Ashes' when my mother was alive, because she would have been ashamed.
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I can't go back. The past won't go away in this family.
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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.
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I never expected to write a book about a slum in Ireland that was going to catapult me, as they say, into some kind of - onto the best seller list.