Frank McCourt
31 quotes
Biography
"You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace."
"Stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it."
"I like the lemon meringue pie but I don't like the way Americans leave out the 'r' at the end of a word."
"Why can't this priest go back to Los Angeles and leave me alone? Why is he taking me to lunch when he should be out there visiting the sick and the dying? That's what priests are for."
"Why is it the minute I open my mouth the whole world is telling me they're Irish and we should all have a drink? 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."
"I put my books in a bag because I don't care anymore if people in the subway look at me admiringly. I can't hold on to a girl, I can't keep an office job, I make a fool of myself in my first literature class and I wonder why I left Limerick at all. [...] I could have read Jonathan Swift to my heart's content not giving a fiddler's fart whether he was a satirist or a seanachie."
"I'd like to stand up in those classes and announce to the world that I'm too busy to be Irish or Catholic or anything else, that I'm working day and night to make a living, trying to read books for my courses and falling asleep in the library [...]."
"I know it wasn't the dinner wine that had me against the wall in a fit of remorse. It was the thought of my mother being so lonesome she had to sit on a street bench, so lonesome she missed the company of a homeless shopping bag woman. Even in the bad days in Limerick she always had an open hand and an open door and why couldn't I be like that to her?"
"He's an amazing man … When he was 12, one of our schoolmasters said: "My boy, you are a literary genius. My strong suggestion is to go to America. They will appreciate you there." Over the years I've read what he's written that never got published, and I always said it still holds. He is a literary genius. Also the most nonjudgmental decent guy. He forgives."
"The sky is the limit. You never have the same experience twice."
"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."
"Happiness is hard to recall. Its just a glow."
"The main thing I am interested in is my experience as a teacher."
"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."
"We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely."
"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."
"After a full belly all is poetry."
"When I came to America, I dreamed bigger dreams."
"I think there's something about the Irish experience - that we had to have a sense of humor or die."
"That's what kept us going - a sense of absurdity, rather than humor."
"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."
"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."
"You sail into the harbor, and Staten Island is on your left, and then you see the Statue of Liberty. This is what everyone in the world has dreams of when they think about New York. And I thought, 'My God, I'm in Heaven. I'll be dancing down Fifth Avenue like Fred Astaire with Ginger Rogers.'"
"Kids all want to look cool, as if knowledge is a great burden, but they're always looking around. They remember."
"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."