Frank Mccourt Quotes

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

~ Frank Mccourt

I know that big people don't like questions from children. They can ask all the questions they like, How's school? Are you a good boy? Did you say your prayers? but if you ask them did they say their prayers you might be hit on the head.

~ Frank Mccourt

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.

~ Frank Mccourt

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.

~ Frank Mccourt

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

After a full belly all is poetry.

~ Frank Mccourt

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.

~ Frank Mccourt

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

I am teaching. Storytelling is teaching.

~ Frank Mccourt

You can't teach in a vacuum. A good teacher relates the material to real life. You understand that, don't you?

~ Frank Mccourt

Teaching is bringing the news.

~ Frank Mccourt

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

~ Frank Mccourt

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

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

First day of your teaching you are to stand at your classroom door and let your students know how happy you are to see them. Stand, I say. Any playwright will tell you that when the actor sits down the play sits down. The best move of all is to establish yourself as a presence and to do it outside in the hallway. Outside, I say. That’s your territory and when you’re out there you’ll be seen as a strong teacher, fearless, ready to face the swarm. That’s what a class is, a swarm. And you’re a warrior teacher. It’s something people don’t think about. Your territory is like your aura, it goes with you everywhere, in the hallways, on the stairs and, assuredly, in the classroom.

~ Frank Mccourt

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

~ Frank Mccourt

There's nothing sillier in the world than a teacher telling you don't do it after you already did it.

~ Frank Mccourt

You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it. If you won the Irish Sweepstakes and bought a house that needed furniture would you fill it with bits and pieces of rubbish? Your mind is your house and if you fill it with rubbish from the cinemas, it will rot in your head. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.

~ Frank Mccourt

I felt so happy I could barely stay in my skin

~ Frank Mccourt

He sits in an old armchair in the corner covered with bits of blankets and a bucket behind the chair that stinks enough to make you sick and when you look at that old man in the dark corner you want to get a hose with hot water and strip him and wash him down and give him a big feed of rashers and eggs and mashed potatoes with loads of butter and salt and onions.I want to take the man from the Boer War and the pile of rags in the bed and put them in a big sunny house in the country with birds chirping away outside the window and a stream gurgling.

~ Frank Mccourt

They said her duck recipe and the Chinese music were so dramatic everything else sounded anemic.

~ Frank Mccourt

Rest your eyes and then read till they fall out of your head.

~ Frank Mccourt

Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.

~ Frank Mccourt

Just let them sit in the goddam sun. But the world won't let them because there's nothing more dangerous than letting old farts sit in the sun. They might be thinking. Same thing with kids. Keep 'em busy or they might start thinking.

~ Frank Mccourt

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

~ Frank Mccourt

When I came to America, I dreamed bigger dreams.

~ 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

I think there's something about the Irish experience - that we had to have a sense of humor or die.

~ Frank Mccourt

That's what kept us going - a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.

~ Frank Mccourt

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.

~ Frank Mccourt

Kids all want to look cool, as if knowledge is a great burden, but they're always looking around. They remember.

~ 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

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

~ Frank Mccourt

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.

~ Frank Mccourt

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

~ Frank Mccourt

We don't look at teachers as scholars the way they do in Europe. In Spain you're called a professor if you're a high school teacher, and they pay teachers - they pay teachers in Europe.

~ 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

Happiness is hard to recall. Its just a glow.

~ Frank Mccourt

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

When I got out of the army, I had the G.I. Bill. Since I had no high school education or anything like that, I came to NYU, and they took a chance on me and let me in.

~ Frank Mccourt