Top 100 Frank McCourt Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “You are never to let anybody slam the door in your face again.”

— Frank McCourt

52. “What are they, Dad? Cows, son. What are cows, Dad? Cows are cows, son.”

— Frank McCourt

53. “When the dark clouds flutter like bats in my head I wish I could open a window and release them.”

— Frank McCourt

54. “And, of course, they’ve always condemned dancing. You know, you might touch a member of the opposite sex. And you might get excited and you might do something natural.”

— Frank McCourt

55. “There’s something hostile about the way they enter and leave the room that tells you what they think of you. It could be your imagination and you try to figure out what will bring them over to your side. You try lessons that worked with other classes but even that doesn’t help and it’s because of that chemistry. They know when they have you on the run. They have instincts that detect your frustrations.”

— Frank McCourt

56. “There are boys here who have to mend their shoes whatever way they can. There are boys in this class with no shoes at all. It’s not their fault and it’s no shame. Our Lord had no shoes. He died shoeless. Do you see Him hanging on the cross sporting shoes? Do you, boys?”

— Frank McCourt

57. “I just have to proceed as usual. No matter what happens, nothing helps with the writing of the next book.”

— Frank McCourt

58. “Teaching is bringing the news.”

— Frank McCourt

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

— Frank McCourt

60. “For once, mam, my bladder isn’t near my eye and why isn’t it?”

— Frank McCourt

61. “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.”

— Frank McCourt

62. “That’s a name for gangsters and politicians.”

— Frank McCourt

63. “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 in this world to be busy or to chat over a nice cup of tea?”

— Frank McCourt

64. “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.”

— Frank McCourt

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

— Frank McCourt

66. “There’s so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd.”

— Frank McCourt

67. “I want to tell them I won’t be able to die for the Faith because I’m already booked to die for Ireland.”

— Frank McCourt

68. “We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely.”

— Frank McCourt

69. “They all went into the bar business. Which was a mistake, because they began to sip at the merchandise and it set them back, set us all back. Well, them more than I.”

— Frank McCourt

70. “I think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book.”

— Frank McCourt

71. “I asked my dad what afflicted meant and he said ‘Sickness son, and things that don’t fit.”

— Frank McCourt

72. “The master says it’s a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it’s a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there’s anyone in the world who would like us to live. My brothers are dead and my sister is dead and I wonder if they died for Ireland or the Faith.”

— Frank McCourt

73. “I was sick of my miserable childhood, too, the way it followed me across the Atlantic and kept nagging at me to be made public.”

— Frank McCourt

74. “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

75. “If you have anything to say, shut up!”

— Frank McCourt

76. “Inertia is, perhaps, the single most powerful stumbling block to writing. It takes energy, courage, patience, and commitment to keep writing in your journal. It’s no small thing to open doors, let down barriers, enter sealed rooms, and walk obscure avenues of memory that haven’t been traveled in years – or perhaps ever been traveled.”

— Frank McCourt

77. “Then he placed on my tongue the wafer, the body and blood of Jesus. At last, at last. It’s on my tongue. I draw it back. It stuck. I had God glued to the roof of my mouth. I could hear the master’s voice, Don’t let that host touch your teeth for if you bite God in two you’ll roast in hell for eternity. I tried to get God down with my tongue but the priest hissed at me, Stop that clucking and get back to your seat.”

— Frank McCourt

78. “He drinks his stout and laughs that there’s nothing like a great bloody steak of a Friday night and if that’s the worst sin he ever commits he’ll float to heaven body and soul, ha ha ha.”

— Frank McCourt

79. “When I act tough they listen politely till the spasm passes. They know.”

— Frank McCourt

80. “In all my years at Stuyvesant only one parent, a mother, asked if her son was enjoying school. I said yes. He seemed to be enjoying himself. She smiled, stood up, said, Thank you, and left. One parent in all those years.”

— Frank McCourt

81. “That IS what journal writing is all about – showing ourselves to God.”

— Frank McCourt

82. “I’ve been writing in notebooks for 40 years or so.”

— Frank McCourt

83. “Mikey’s father, champion of all pint drinkers, is like my uncle Pa Keating, he doesn’t give a fiddler’s fart what the world says and that’s the way I’d like to be myself.”

— Frank McCourt

84. “Fear? That’s it, Francis. The little slum boy still fears loss of job. Fears he’ll be cast into the outer darkness and deafened by the weeping, the wailing, the gnashing. Brave, imaginative teacher encourages teenagers to sing recipes but wonders when the axe will fall, when Japanese visitors will shake their heads and report him to Washington. Japanese visitors will instantly detect in my classroom signs of America’s degeneracy and wonder how they could have lost the war. And.”

— Frank McCourt

85. “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.”

— Frank McCourt

86. “Nobody ever told them they had a right to an opinion.”

— Frank McCourt

87. “There are bars of Pear’s soap and a thick book called Pear’s Encyclopedia, which keeps me up day and night because it tells you everything about everything and that’s all I want to know.”

— Frank McCourt

88. “Where did I get the nerve to think I could handle American teenagers? Ignorance. That’s where I got the nerve.”

— Frank McCourt

89. “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

90. “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.”

— Frank McCourt

91. “Everything in my head was secondhand, too: Catholicism; Ireland’s sad history, a litany of suffering and martyrdom drummed into me by priests, schoolmasters and parents who knew no better.”

— Frank McCourt

92. “I can’t go too much into my domestic life because there are ex-wives ready to do me in.”

— Frank McCourt

93. “To enter a room is to move from one environment to another and that, for the teenager, can be traumatic. There be dragons, daily horrors from acne to zit.”

— Frank McCourt

94. “Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it... you might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.”

— Frank McCourt

95. “You feel a sense of urgency, especially at my advanced age, when you’re staring into the grave.”

— Frank McCourt

96. “I’m more interested in writing than in performing.”

— Frank McCourt

97. “Ooh, aren’t we getting solemn, and where did I leave my soapbox? Look.”

— Frank McCourt

98. “If everyone moved on and up and out who would teach the children?”

— Frank McCourt

99. “I think my father is like the Holy Trinity with three people in him, the one in the morning with the paper, the one at night with the stories and the prayers, and then the one who does the bad thing and comes home with the smell of whiskey and wants us to die for Ireland.”

— Frank McCourt

100. “They say she’s always angry because she has red hair or she has red hair because she’s always angry.”

— Frank McCourt