Angela's Ashes Quotes
"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while."
"My father, Malachy McCourt, was born on a farm in Toome, County Antrim. Like his father before, he grew up wild, in trouble with the English, or the Irish, or both."
"At the St. Vincent de Paul School, Angela learned to read, write, and calculate and by her ninth year her schooling was done."
"Love her as in childhood Though feeble, old and grey. For you’ll never miss a mother’s love Till she’s buried beneath the clay."
"Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain."
"Och, aye, the way they do in the far reaches of County Antrim."
"Anyone can see why I wanted your kiss, It had to be and the reason is this."
"You have nobody to blame but yourself for gettin’ into trouble with a drunkard from the North, a man that doesn’t even look like a Catholic, him with his odd manner."
"You can teach them to die for Ireland in the daytime, Malachy."
"You’d wonder why you’d want to eat your dinner off the floor when you had a table and a chair."
"There’s enough consumption in Limerick without people smokin’ fags on top of it an’ ’tis a rich man’s foolishness."
"Ye better behave yeerselves before I go over to ye."
"That night Mam’s sister, Aunt Aggie, came home from her job in the clothing factory."
"We were together, away from grandmothers and guards, Malachy could say ye ye ye and we could laugh as much as we liked."
"Dad reached for him and held him. Whisht, he said. Whisht."
"He filled the kettle and the pot with water, stood the mattress against the wall, pounded it with a shoe."
"You could stroll the four green fields of Ireland without fear of snakes an’ have a good night’s sleep with no fleas to bother you."
"When he comes back and the ambulance is right behind him."
"Mam says that’s just enough for all of us to starve on."
"Mam smiles, too, but it’s a very quick smile."
"We stand in a queue with women wearing black shawls."
"I know that big people don’t like questions from children."
"Angels come down from above, he says, and not up from kitchens like ours."
"That’s what we did in Antrim long before there were doctors riding their horses."
"Is there anyone in this class that thinks he's perfect? Raise your hands."
"It's not their fault and it's no shame. Our Lord had no shoes."
"I'll understand when I grow up. It must be lovely to wake up in the morning and understand everything."
"Isn’t it curious the way big people laugh over the angel who brought them a new child."
"I’d like to be like all the big people in the church, standing and kneeling and praying and understanding everything."
"And Limerick town has no happier hearth than mine has been with my man from the North."
"A man who’s discovered to be an informer deserves to be hanged."
"That's the job of an angel, even the one on the seventh step."
"Go home, she'll say, and tell your father to get off his northern arse and get a job like the decent men of Limerick."
"There are times when you wouldn’t know whether to shit or go blind."
"Everyone knows Limerick is the holiest city in Ireland because it has the Arch Confraternity of the Holy Family."
"You won’t find the Pope sitting around drinking tea while he speaks the Latin."
"She wouldn’t give it to the world to say her son went on the altar dirty."
"’Tis class distinction. They don’t want boys from lanes on the altar."
"Anyone who doesn’t understand the theorems of Euclid is an idiot."
"Without Euclid, boys, mathematics would be a poor doddering thing."
"We’d like to ask Nellie to keep the peel for us before the rats get it."
"Oh, the nights of the Kerry dancing, Oh, the ring of the piper’s tune."
"I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way."
"Sister Rita stops us in the hall to tell me I’m a great disappointment to her."
"The Kerry nurse tells me I better not get the notion she’ll be running up to this part of the world every time I have a little pain or a twinge."
"She says ’twould break your heart to think of what the English did to us."
"Nurses and nuns never think you know what they’re talking about."
"Anyway, Frankie, you’ll be outa here one of these fine days and you can read all the poetry you want."
"’Tis a dirty rotten thing to die in a lavatory when you’re lovely in yourself."
"I don’t want to be a baby. I don’t want to be in this empty ward with no Patricia and no highwayman and no red-lipped landlord’s daughter."
"It’s lovely to know the world can’t interfere with the inside of your head."
"I’m not complaining, nurse, I’m only wondering if I’ll be home for Christmas."
"I don’t know anything about dampers. In our house we have a fireplace in Ireland downstairs and a fireplace in Italy upstairs and no sign of a damper."
"The worst thing in the world is to go into a lavatory after a man that had a feed of pig’s feet and a night of pints."
"You’d have to feel sorry for Michael because he’s too old to play with Alphie and too young to play with us and he can’t fight with anyone for the same reasons."
"If little Alphie gets tired and cranky and cries Uncle Pa pulls his shirt back from his chest and tells him, 'Here, have a suck of diddy momma.'"
"When I’m a man I won’t go around thumping small children over dampers or anything else."
"She’s still in the bed with Alphie. She tells Malachy to fill Alphie’s bottle with milk and bring it to him."
"The streets are frosty, and icy, too, but the Jesuit church is warm."
"I’d keep going on into the country forever if I didn’t have Alphie bawling with the hunger, kicking his chubby legs, waving his empty bottle."
"The human hand itself is a sneaky bugger and you never know what it’s been up to."
"’Tis far from two cuts of fried bread ye were brought up."
"He could be the champion in the opposite department."
"I can’t give you anything but love, baby. That’s the only thing I’ve plenty of, baby."
"Now I blink and bathe my eyes with the boric acid powder in warm water."
"The streets going up from the Dock Road are too hilly for Mr. Hannon to ride the bicycle and carry me, so we walk."
"A horse might take a notion to go for a walk for himself and there you are with the leg or the arm caught in the wheel and twisted off your body and you looking at it."
"Surely the world is looking at me and admiring the way I rock with the float, the cool way I have with the reins and the whip."
"That Shakespeare is that good he must have been an Irishman."
"Uncle Pa says, What are you doing all black yourself, Frankie? Did you fall down a coal mine?"
"The world is wide and you can have great adventures."
"I can hear plays by O’Casey, Shaw, Ibsen and Shakespeare himself, the best of all, even if he is English."
"All I want to know is where I came from but if you ask anyone they tell you ask someone else or send you from word to word."
"The feast of St. Christina the Astonishing is the twenty-fourth of July and I think I’ll keep that for myself along with the feast of St. Francis of Assisi on the fourth of October."
"Hoppy O’Halloran is the only master in Leamy’s National School who ever sits."
"If we don’t want him tormenting us with algebra or Irish grammar all we have to do is ask him a question about America."
"Yet he was kind, or, if severe in aught, The love he bore to learning was in fault."
"The priests of Limerick have no patience with the likes of me."
"I could understand my father sucking the bad stuff out of Michael’s head when he was a baby and desperate but I don’t understand why God wanted St. Moling to go around sucking the snot out of lepers’ heads."
"I don’t understand God at all and even if I’d like to be a saint and have everyone adore me I’d never suck the snot of a leper."
"Turgid. The dictionary says swollen and that’s what I am, standing there looking at the dictionary because I know now what Mikey Molloy was talking about all along, that we’re no different from the dogs that get stuck in each other in the streets."
"By the time the kettle boils The Abbot is asleep from the drink and Aunt Aggie says she and Uncle Pa will have a drop of tea themselves and she doesn’t mind if I have a drop myself."
"The thought of the shame brings a pain in my heart and starts me sniffling."
"I drink the odd pint of milk and leave the bottle so that the milkman won’t be blamed for not delivering."
"I bring home the bread and even if The Abbot is surprised he doesn’t say, Where did you get it?"
"Mrs. Clohessy says, We have enough money for food and shoes at last, thanks be to God and His Blessed Mother."
"After the film I can have tea and buns in the restaurant upstairs."
"I can’t leave the pile of rags alone with a useless money order because the pile is an old woman, Mrs. Gertrude Daly."
"I slip the telegram under the door and cycle back down to the Franciscan church to beg for the repose of Theresa’s soul."
"I hobble through the streets of Limerick. I’d like to go back and throw a brick through Mr. Harrington’s window."
"When you’re poor a threatening letter is a threatening letter no matter how it comes in the door."
"Sometimes she falls asleep and if the purse drops to the floor I help myself to an extra few shillings for the overtime."
"They wouldn’t let me be an altar boy, a secondary school pupil, a missionary with the White Fathers. I don’t care."
"He says, Have a lemonade there, Frankie, or is it a pint you want now that you’re near sixteen?"
"Do you hear what I said, Frankie? Pension my arse."
"I’m getting tired, son, but there’s one thing I want to tell you. Never smoke another man’s pipe."
"I’d rather be like my father than Laman Griffin."
"A mother’s love is a blessing, no matter where you roam."
"Surely I should have stayed, taken the post office examination, climbed in the world."
"I’m sorry I wrote threatening letters to the poor people in the lanes of Limerick, my own people."