Tis Frank Mccourt Quotes

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

I told her tea bags were just a convenience for people with busy lives and she said 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 into this world to be busy or to chat over a nice cup of tea?

...you, the privileged, the chosen, the pampered, with nothing to do but go to school, hang out, do a little studying, go to college, get into a money-making racket, grow into your fat forties, still whining, still complaining, when there are millions around the world who'd offer fingers and toes to be in your seats, nicely clothed, well fed, with the world by the balls.

I can't go back. The past won't go away in this family...

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.

I felt so happy I could barely stay in my skin

I'm sitting up in the bed with my knees pulled to my chest and there are tears that won't come to my eyes but beat instead like a small sea around my heart.

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.

I'm in New York, land of the free and home of the brave, but I'm supposed to behave as if I were in Limerick at all times.

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

But I don't know how I'll ever get a college degree and rise in the world with no high school diploma and eyes like piss holes in the snow, as everyone tells me.

If 'tis a sin, I don't give a Fiddler's fart!

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?

The boys from Staten Island would fill more body bags than Stuyvesant could ever imagine. Mechanics and plumbers had to fight while college students shook indignant fists, fornicated in the fields of Woodstock and sat in.

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

She made tea in a teapot and couldn’t help sniffing at the idea of tea bags. I told her tea bags were just a convenience for people with busy lives and she said 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 into this world to be busy or to chat over a nice cup of tea?

Here I am looking at my lovely ten-year-old daughter, Maggie, in her white dress, singing Protestant hymns with the choir at the Plymouth Church of the Brethren when I should be at Mass praying for the repose of the soul of my mother, Angela McCourt, mother of seven, believer, sinner, though when I contemplate her seventy-three years on this earth I can’t believe the Lord God Almighty on His throne would even dream of consigning her to the flames. A God like that wouldn’t deserve the time of day.

For once, mam, my bladder isn't near my eye and why isn't it?

That’s the main job of cops in New York, telling everyone move back.

The devil you know is better than the devil you don't.

If I had the money I could buy a torch and read till dawn. In America a torch is called a flashlight. A biscuit is called a cookie, a bun is a roll. Confectionery is pastry and minced meat is ground. Men wear pants instead of trousers and they’ll even say this pant leg is shorter than the other which is silly. When I hear them saying pant leg I feel like breathing faster. The lift is an elevator and if you want a WC or a lavatory you have to say bathroom even if there isn’t a sign of a bath there. And no one dies in America, they pass away or they’re deceased and when they die the body, which is called the remains, is taken to a funeral home where people just stand around and look at it and no one sings or tells a story or takes a drink and then it’s taken away in a casket to be interred. They don’t like saying coffin and they don’t like saying buried. They never say graveyard. Cemetery sounds nicer.

Where is she now, Dad? If there's a heaven, Maggie, she's there and she's queen of it. Is there a heaven, Dad? If there isn't, Maggie, I don't understand God's ways. She doesn't understand my babbling and neither do I because the tears erupt and she tells me again, It's all right to cry, Dad.

People arrived and there was eating, drinking, dancing and misunderstandings between all the couples, married and unmarried. Frank Schwake wouldn’t talk to his wife, Jean. Jim Collins quarreled in a corner with his wife, Sheila. There was still a coolness between Alberta and me and between Brian and Joyce. Other couples were affected and there were islands of tension all over the apartment. The night would have been ruined except for the way we all united against an outside danger.

Hello, you listenin' to me? I got the egg timer goin' and you got three minutes to tell me how can I stop these goddam pigeons, excuse the language, miss, how I can stop these pigeons from making love on the outside part of my air conditioner. They're driving me crazy with the coo coo all day and they shit all over the window. You can't tell me that now? You have to look it up? Whaddaya have to look up? Pigeons fornicating on my air conditioner and you have to look it up. Sorry, egg timer ran out and that's the three minutes. Good-bye.

Dolores asuu talossa, jonka pienellä etupihalla on neitsyt Marian patsas ja vaaleanpunainen lintupatsas. Seisomme pienen rautaportin luona ja minä en oikein tiedä pitäisikö nyt suudella häntä jolloin hän saattaisi innostua niin että saattaisimme hiippailla jonkin puun taakse kiihotusta harjoittamaan, mutta samassa kuuluu sisältä karjaisu Jumalauta, Dolores, äkkiä sisään sieltä, jo on otsaa kun tuolla lailla perkele pikkutunneilla kotiin lampsitaan, ja sano sille perkeleen turvenuijalle että ottaa jalat alleen ja juoksee henkensä edestä, ja Dolores sanoo vain oi ja juoksee sisään.

After my classes at Brooklyn College I would sometimes leave the train at Bergen Street to visit my mother. If she knew I was coming she’d make soda bread so warm and delicious it melted in the mouth as fast as the butter she slathered on it. She made tea in a teapot and couldn’t help sniffing at the idea of tea bags. I told her tea bags were just a convenience for people with busy lives and she said 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 into this world to be busy or to chat over a nice cup of tea?

In the nineteen sixties and early seventies students wore buttons and headbands demanding equal rights for women, blacks, Native Americans and all oppressed minorities, an end to the war in Vietnam, the salvation of the rain forests and the planet in general. [...] College students boycotted class, taught in, rioted everywhere, dodged the draft, fled to Canada or Scandinavia. High school students came to school fresh from images of war on television news, men blown to bits in rice paddies, helicopters hovering, tentative soldiers of the Viet Cong blasted out of their tunnels, their hands behind their heads, lucky for the moment they weren’t blasted back in again, images of anger back home, marches, demonstrations, hell no we won’t go, sit-ins, teachins, students falling before the guns of the National Guard, blacks recoiling from Bull Connor’s dogs, burn baby burn, black is beautiful, trust no one over thirty, I have a dream and, at the end of it all, your President is not a crook. [...]Mechanics and plumbers had to fight while college students shook indignant fists, fornicated in the fields of Woodstock and sat in.

Menen Horacen luo ja puristan hänenkin kättään. En pysty sanomaan mitään, koska tunnen jollakin merkillisellä tavalla rakastavani häntä ja toivon että hän olisi isäni, eikä silloin ole helppo puhua. Hän ei sano mitään koska tietää hyvin että tällaisina hetkinä sanoilla ei ole merkitystä. Hän vain taputtaa minua olalle, ja viimeinen mitä Port Warehousesissa kuulen on Eddie Lynchin ääni kun hän sanoo miehille takaisin töihin siitä, senkin vetelä mulkkulauma.

Tis' your life, make your own decisions and to hell with the begrudgers, Frankie.

I told her tea bags were just a convenience for people with busy lives and she said 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 into this world to be busy or to chat over a nice cup of tea?

I have no notion of what he’s talking about. I have to lie and say, I do. He says, You do know he was perhaps the greatest satirist in English literature. I thought he was Irish.

You’re the first boy I ever met who didn’t know what a linebacker is. Boy. I’m twenty-four years old and she’s calling me a boy and I’m wondering do you have to be forty to be a man in America?

He said Mao Tse-tung and the Communists would save China and the lieutenant showing the film said communism is evil, godless, unAmerican, and Di Angelo said capitalism was evil, godless and unAmerican and he wouldn’t give two cents for isms anyway because people with isms cause all the troubles in the world and you may have noticed there is no ism in democracy.

No, I wouldn’t mind after priests telling us that all prayers that are unselfish and not for ourselves reach God’s ears.

And I suppose they'll be wanting sugar and milk on top of everything or the might be banging on my door looking for an egg if you don't mind. I don't know why we have to pay for Angela's mistakes. Jesus, says Grandma, 'tis a good thing you didn't own that stable in Bethlehem or the Holy Family would still be wanderin' the world crumblin' with the hunger

Tis

Tis easy to see they're not used to having anything the way the brag about everything.

When I asked her about her days in Brooklyn she doled out scraps and then went silent. What was the use? The past is the past and it’s dangerous to go back.

Com'è che appena apro bocca tutti quanti mi dicono che sono irlandesi e perché non andiamo a bere qualcosa insieme? Essere americano non basta. Bisogna essere sempre anche qualcos'altro, irlandesi-americani, tedesco americani, sicché viene da chiedersi come sarebbero andati avanti se qualcuno non avesse inventato il trattino (110).

Haloo, kuuluuko? Minulla on tässä munakello päällä ja teillä on nyt kolme minuuttia aikaa kertoa miten minä saan nuo perkeleen neiti suo anteeksi pulut kuriin etteivät ne paneskele kaiken aikaa minun ilmastointilaitteeni päällä tuolla ikkunan ulkopuolella. Kaiken päivää saa kuunnella niiden huhuhuuta niin että hulluksi meinaa tulla ja sitten ne paskantavat ikkunat umpeen. Ai ette pysty heti sanomaan? Pitää selvittää ensin? Mitä siinä on selvittämistä? Pulut rietastelevat minun ilmastointilaitteellani ja teidän pitää ruveta selvittämään. Valitan, munakello sanoo että kolme minuuttia on kulunut. Hyvästi.