Frank McCourt Quotes

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.

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.

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, don't you?

Teaching is bringing the news.

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

I felt so happy I could barely stay in my skin

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 with it.

When I came to America, I dreamed bigger dreams.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.