“I appealed to my mother. I told her it wasn't fair the way the whole family was invading my dreams and she said, Arrah, for the love o' God, drink your tea and go to school and stop tormenting us with your dreams. ”

“When she's not talking to him the house is heavy and cold and we know we're not supposed to talk to him either for fear she'll give us the bitter look. We know Dad has done the bad thing and we know you can make anyone suffer by not talking to him. Even little Michael knows that when Dad does the bad thing you don't talk to him from Friday to Monday and when he tries to lift you to his lap you run to Mam.”

“Women stand with their arms folded chatting. They don't sit because all they do is stay at home, take care of the children, clean the house and cook a bit and the men need the chairs. The men sit because they are worn out from walking to the Labour Exchange every morning to sign for the dole, discussing the world's pro less and wondering what to do with the rest of the day.”

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

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

“I felt so happy I could barely stay in my skin”

“Teaching is bringing the news.”

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

“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.”

“Then he placed on my tongue the wafer, the body and blood of Jesus. At last, at last. It’s on my tongue. I draw it back. It stuck. I had God glued to the roof of my mouth. I could hear the master’s voice, Don’t let that host touch your teeth for if you bite God in two you’ll roast in hell for eternity. I tried to get God down with my tongue but the priest hissed at me, Stop that clucking and get back to your seat.”

“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 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.”

“The English wouldn't give you the steam of their piss.”

“A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse”

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

“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?”

“In New York, with Prohibition in full swing, he thought he had died and gone o hell for his sins. Then he discovered speakeasies and he rejoiced.”

“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.”

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

“A job is death without dignity.”

“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.”

“Saturday night when you have a few shillings in your pocket is the most delicious night of the week.”

“Clarke, define resplendent. I think it’s shining, sir. Pithy, Clarke, but adequate. McCourt, give us a sentence with pithy. Clarke is pithy but adequate, sir. Adroit, McCourt. You have a mind for the priesthood, my boy, or politics. Think of that.”

“I am teaching. Storytelling is teaching.”

“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.”

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

“Samuel Beckett was saying, in a new biography, that he could remember being in the womb, which, of course, is a bit far-fetched. But he's an Irishman, so nothing's too far-fetched.”

“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.”

“That's what he disliked about certain artists and writers. They interfered and pointed to everything as if you couldn't see it or read for yourself.”

“That’s a name for gangsters and politicians.”

“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.”

“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.”

“He drinks his stout and laughs that there’s nothing like a great bloody steak of a Friday night and if that’s the worst sin he ever commits he’ll float to heaven body and soul, ha ha ha.”

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

“That IS what journal writing is all about—showing ourselves to God.”

“What are they, Dad? Cows, son. What are cows, Dad? Cows are cows, son.”

“I was sick of my miserable childhood, too, the way it followed me across the Atlantic and kept nagging at me to be made public.”

“There's nothing worse in the world than to owe and be beholden to anyone.”

“This is the situation in the public schools of America: The farther you travel from the classroom the greater your financial and professional rewards.”

“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. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it. [...] Your mind is your house and if you fill it with rubbish (...) it will rot in your head. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.”

“The bus stops at the O’Connell Monument and Uncle Pat goes to the Monument Fish and Chip Café where the smells are so delicious my stomach beats with the hunger. He gets a shilling’s worth of fish and chips and my mouth is watering”

“There are bars of Pear's soap and a thick book called Pear's Encyclopedia, which keeps me up day and night because it tells you everything about everything and that's all I want to know.”

“If you have anything to say, shut up!”

“Stock your minds and you can move through the world resplendent.”

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

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

“Mikey’s father, champion of all pint drinkers, is like my uncle Pa Keating, he doesn’t give a fiddler’s fart what the world says and that’s the way I’d like to be myself.”

“Ooh, aren’t we getting solemn, and where did I leave my soapbox? Look”

“He knows how it is to leave Ireland, did it himself and never got over it. You live in Los Angeles with sun and palm trees day in day out and you ask God if there’s any chance He could give you one soft rainy Limerick day”