Frank McCourt Quotes

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Frank McCourt

Profession : Author

Birth : August 19, 1930

St. Patrick, bringing the religion to Ireland, this is what we should celebrate.

Frank McCourt

The main thing I am interested in is my experience as a teacher.

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

Everyone has a story to tell. All you have to do is write it. But it's not that easy.

Frank McCourt

Happiness is hard to recall. Its just a glow.

Frank McCourt

For some reason, I wrote about the bed we slept in when I was a kid. It was a half-acre of misery, that bed, sagging in the middle, red hair sticking out of the mattress, the spring gone and the fleas leaping all over the place.

Frank McCourt

You look at passers-by in Rome and think, 'Do they know what they have here?' You can say the same about Philadelphia. Do people know what went on here?

Frank McCourt

My father and mother should have stayed in New York, where they met and married and where I was born.

Frank McCourt

Ireland, once you live there, you're seduced by it.

Frank McCourt

Worse than the ordinary, miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

Frank McCourt

I became a teacher all right. I wanted to become a teacher because I had a misconception about it. I didn't know that I'd be going into - when I first became a high school teacher in New York, that I'd be going into a battle zone, and no one prepared me for that.

Frank McCourt

The happy childhood is hardly worth your while.

Frank McCourt

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.'

Frank McCourt

We were below welfare. We begged from people on welfare. My father tried to repair our shoes with pieces of bicycle tires.

Frank McCourt

I loved reading and writing, and teaching was the most exalted profession I could imagine.

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all.

Frank McCourt

Just luxuriate in a certain memory, and the details will come. It's like a magnet attracting steel filings.

Frank McCourt