quotes by Frank McCourt

"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."
— Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes)

"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 (Angela's Ashes)

"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 (Angela's Ashes)

"It’s lovely to know that the world can’t interfere with the inside of your head."
— Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes)

"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. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it."
— Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes)

"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 (' Tis: a Memoir)

"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 (Angela's Ashes)

"If you were mean to your parents, they'd give you a good belf in the gob and send you flying across the room."
— Frank McCourt

"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

"It shows that you're always something else in this country. You can't just be an American."
— Frank McCourt (' Tis: a Memoir)

"If you were mean to your parents, they'd give you a good belt and send you flying across the room."
— Frank McCourt (Teacher Man: A Memoir)

"I can't go back. The past won't go away in this family..."
— Frank McCourt (' Tis: a Memoir)

"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 (' Tis: a Memoir)

"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 (' Tis: a Memoir)

"I told her tea bags were just a convenience for people with busy lives and she said no one is so busy they can't take time to make a decent cup of tea and if you are that busy you don't deserve a decent cup of tea for what is it all about anyway? Are we put into this world to be busy or to chat over a nice cup of tea?"
— Frank McCourt (' Tis: a Memoir)

"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."
— Frank McCourt

"...you, the privileged, the chosen, the pampered, with nothing to do but go to school, hang out, do a little studying, go to college, get into a money-making racket, grow into your fat forties, still whining, still complaining, when there are millions around the world who'd offer fingers and toes to be in your seats, nicely clothed, well fed, with the world by the balls."
— Frank McCourt (' Tis: a Memoir)

"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 (' Tis: a Memoir)

"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.
. . . nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years."
— Frank McCourt