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

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

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

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I am teaching. Storytelling is teaching.”

“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.”

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