Frank McCourt Quotes

I know that big people don't like questions from children. They can ask all the questions they like,...

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

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

First day of your teaching you are to stand at your classroom door and let your students know how ha...

Just let them sit in the goddam sun. But the world won't let them because there's nothing more dange...

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

To enter a room is to move from one environment to another and that, for the teenager, can be trauma...

I am teaching. Storytelling is teaching.

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

Teaching is bringing the news.

Everything in my head was secondhand, too: Catholicism; Ireland's sad history, a litany of suffering...

There's something hostile about the way they enter and leave the room that tells you what they think...

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

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

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

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

You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind....

The master says it’s a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it’s a glorious thing to die...

He sits in an old armchair in the corner covered with bits of blankets and a bucket behind the chair...

They can afford to smile because they all have teeth so dazzling if they dropped them in the snow th...

Your mind is a treasure house that you should stock well and it’s the one part of you the world can’...

I felt so happy I could barely stay in my skin

I became a teacher all right. I wanted to become a teacher because I had a misconception about it. I...

I think that's why you see so many Americans in Dublin look so sad: they are looking for the door th...

Actually, my mother and Alfie came for three weeks' Christmas vacation and stayed for 21 years. I gu...

Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow...

Mam was always saying we had a simple diet: tea and bread, bread and tea, a liquid and a solid, a ba...

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...

You sail into the harbor, and Staten Island is on your left, and then you see the Statue of Liberty....

First of all there is always that artistic challenge of creating something. Or the particular experi...

Happiness is hard to recall. Its just a glow.

After a full belly all is poetry.

If I have a cause, it's the cause of the teacher.

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

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

When I was a teacher, I'd walk into the classroom. I stood at the board. I was the man. I directed o...

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

When I got out of the army, I had the G.I. Bill. Since I had no high school education or anything li...

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

When I came to America, I dreamed bigger dreams.

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

We don't look at teachers as scholars the way they do in Europe. In Spain you're called a professor ...

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