Frank McCourt Quotes

You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.

Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale.

I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.

Stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it.

It’s lovely to know that the world can’t interfere with the inside of your head.

I don't believe in happiness anyway... it's too much of an American pastime, this search for happiness. Just forget happiness and enjoy your misery.

In the high school classroom you are a drill sergent, a rabbi, a shoulder to cry on, a disciplinarian, a singer, a low-level scholar, a clerk, a referee, a clown, a counselor, a dress-code enforcer, a conductor, an apologist, a philosopher, a collaborator, a tap dancer, a politician, a therapist, a fool, a traffic cop, a priest, a mother-father-brother-sister-uncle-aunt, a bookeeper, a critic, a psychologist, the last straw.

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.

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.

Your mind is a treasure house that you should stock well and it's the one part of you the world can't interfere with.

I am teaching. Storytelling is teaching

A mother's love is a blessing No matter where you roam. Keep her while you have her, You'll miss her when she's gone -- Angela's Ashes.

Shakespeare is like mashed potatoes, you can never get enough of him.

They can afford to smile because they all have teeth so dazzling if they dropped them in the snow they'd be lost forever.

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.

After a full belly all is poetry.

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.

You never know when you might come home and find Mam sitting by the fire chatting with a woman and a child, strangers. Always a woman and child. Mam finds them wandering the streets and if they ask, Could you spare a few pennies, miss? her heart breaks. She never has money so she invites them home for tea and a bit of fried bread and if it's a bad night she'll let them sleep by the fire on a pile of rags in the corner. The bread she gives them always means less for us and if we complain she says there are always people worse off and we can surely spare a little from what we have.

The sky is the limit. You never have the same experience twice.

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.

Keep scribbling! Something will happen.

Happiness is hard to recall. Its just a glow.

I appealed to my mother. I told her it wasn't fair the way the whole family was invading my dreams and she said, Arrah, for the love o' God, drink your tea and go to school and stop tormenting us with your dreams.

I don't absolve my father completely of his responsibility for what he did to us I feel compassion, maybe. He had his demons. But I still can't understand how a man can walk away from children. And leave them to starve, as we nearly did, if it wasn't for my mother going out and begging.

There's so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd.