Frank McCourt Quotes
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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.
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We've had enough of the generals and movie stars. We want to hear about the ordinary people.
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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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If I went to the pub lunch and cleared my head with a pint surely there would be an insight, a flash of inspiration. Surely. My money went over the bar. The pint came back. Nothing else.
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I had moments with my father that were exquisite - the stories he told me about Cuchulain, the mythological Irish warrior, are still magical to me.
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If somebody wants me to speak in, say, Chicago, a limousine picks me up at the door to brings me to the airport. I fly at the front of the plane, and a limousine meets me at the other end to take me to a grand hotel, and usually an envelope is left for me with a per diem, maybe $150-a-day walking around money, and then I go home.
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I ate the sandwich.
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I'm more interested in writing than in performing.
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I worked in a number of high schools in New York, and I wound up at Stuyvesant High School, which is known nationally for producing brilliant scientists and mathematicians, but I had writing classes. I thought I was teaching. They thought I was teaching, but I was learning.
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They tell me I'm on 'Politically Incorrect' with Ollie North. That should be a lot of fun.
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I like the lemon meringue pie but I don't like the way Americans leave out the 'r' at the end of a word.
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Sure, I went through my 'J'accuse' phase. I was so angry for so long, I could hardly have a conversation without getting into an argument. And it was only when I felt I could finally distance myself from my past that I began to write about what happened - not just to me, but to lots of young people. I think my story is a cautionary tale.
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I wanted to be the Great Liberating Teacher, to raise them from their knees after days of drudgery in office and factories, to help them cast off their shackles, to lead them to the mountaintop, to breathe the air of freedom. Once their minds were clear of cant, they’d see me as a savior.
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I was a houseman, the lowest. I was just above - in the hierarchy of jobs, I was just above the Puerto Rican dishwashers - just above, so I felt superior to them.
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The happy childhood is hardly worth your while.
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I loved reading and writing, and teaching was the most exalted profession I could imagine.
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The part of Limerick we lived in is Georgian, you know, those Georgian houses. You see them in pictures of Dublin.
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Worse than the ordinary, miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
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My father and mother should have stayed in New York, where they met and married and where I was born.
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I didn't know you could write about yourself. Nobody ever told me about this.
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I've had experiences on both sides of the ocean and various classrooms and bedrooms around New York.
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If there was a circle, I was never a part of it. I prowled the periphery.
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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.
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There was a kind of madness in the country. Eamon De Valera, the prime minister, had this vision of an Ireland where we'd all be in some kind of native costume - which doesn't exist - and we'd be dancing at the crossroads, babbling away in Gaelic, going to Mass, everyone virginal and pure.