Quote

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

Frank McCourt

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Frank McCourt
Age: 78 †
Born: 1930
Born: August 19
Died: 2009
Died: July 19
Autobiographer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Francis McCourt
Song
Tell
Tale
Tales
Sing
Dance

More quotes by Frank McCourt

Image
The happy childhood is hardly worth your while.
Frank McCourt
Image
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
Image
If you were mean to your parents, they'd give you a good belt in the gob and send you flying across the room.
Frank McCourt
Image
It's not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you'd wonder how they'd get along if someone hadn't invented the hyphen
Frank McCourt
Image
The sky is the limit. You never have the same experience twice.
Frank McCourt
Image
My childhood here... was very limited. So it was a long, long time before I actually went out to Brooklyn.
Frank McCourt
Image
Shakespeare is like mashed potatoes, you can never get enough of him.
Frank McCourt
Image
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
Image
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.
Frank McCourt
Image
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
Image
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.
Frank McCourt
Image
Teacher? I never dreamed I could rise so high in the world
Frank McCourt
Image
There were positive things about the church, that is, in the European cultural sense, the architecture, the liturgy, the music, the art, such as it was, the stations of the cross in the church, the tradition, and the atmosphere of awe and mystery in the mass. The atmosphere of miracle, one of mainly mystery, that's what fascinates me.
Frank McCourt
Image
Where did I get the nerve to think I could handle American teenagers? Ignorance. That's where I got the nerve.
Frank McCourt
Image
There's nothing sillier in the world than a teacher telling you don't do it after you already did it.
Frank McCourt
Image
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
Image
When I act tough they listen politely till the spasm passes. They know.
Frank McCourt
Image
I'm more interested in writing than in performing.
Frank McCourt
Image
I asked my dad what afflicted meant and he said 'Sickness son, and things that don't fit.'
Frank McCourt
Image
I'm not one of those James Joyce intellectuals who can stand back and look at the whole edifice... It was a slow process for me to just crawl out of it, like a snake leaving his skin behind.
Frank McCourt