Frank McCourt Quotes
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Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale.
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I don't see myself as either Irish or American, I'm a New Yorker.
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When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all.
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Mam was always saying we had a simple diet: tea and bread, bread and tea, a liquid and a solid, a balanced diet - what more do you need? Nobody got fat.
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If there was a circle, I was never a part of it. I prowled the periphery.
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A funeral was a great form of entertainment. A wake was a great form of entertainment.
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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 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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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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I hated school in Ireland.
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I'm more interested in writing than in performing.
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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.
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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 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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I didn't have to struggle at all to get an agent and a publisher. Everything fell into my lap.
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If I have a cause, it's the cause of the teacher.
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For some reason, I had a responsibility to my family and the people who lived around me. I felt that I had to convey their dignity - the way they dealt with adversity and poverty - and their good humor.
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We had nothing, no television, no radio, nothing to get in the way. We read by the streetlight at the top of the lane, and we acted out the stories.
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The day I write my last word will be the day that I feel free.
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My childhood here... was very limited. So it was a long, long time before I actually went out to Brooklyn.
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Certain citizens claimed I had disgraced the fair name of the city of Limerick, that I had attacked the church, that I had despoiled my mother's name, and that if I returned to Limerick, I would surely be found hanging from a lamppost.
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I was unloading sides of beef down on the docks when I decided enough was enough. By then, I'd done a lot of reading on my own, so I persuaded New York University to enroll me.
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When I was a teacher, I'd walk into the classroom. I stood at the board. I was the man. I directed operations. I was an intellectual and artistic and moral traffic cop, and I - and I would direct the class, most of the time.
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The sky is the limit. You never have the same experience twice.