A Quote by Frank McCourt

People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying school masters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years. Above all -- we were wet.

Frank McCourt

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About Above Brag Bullying Compare Defeated Did Early Early Years Eight English Everywhere Father Fire Hundred Irish Long Masters Moaning Mother Nothing People Pious Pompous Poverty Priests School Terrible Terrible Thing Terrible Things Things Us Version Were Wet Woes Years

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Frank McCourt
Irish - Author
August 19, 1930 - July 19, 2009

My parents were born in Norfolk and spent their early years working in the big houses of that rural English county, my mother as a cook and my father as a handyman and chauffeur.

Paul Nurse

I think it's important for people to say look, what does each party and each candidate have to offer for you. If you want a better future that is going to be reliant on making smart economic policies, compare my husband's eight years with Ronald Reagan's eight years. 23 million new jobs, more than seven million people lifted out of poverty.

Hillary Clinton

There is a latent anger in a lot of people that went to boarding school at an early age. I was eight. And I loved it over the five years, but I think the adjustments for eight-year-olds are a lot. And I think it informs who you are for a long, long time.

Damian Lewis

The NBA's been around how long? A hundred years? Fifty years? So to change it now, whoever that person is needs his college degree revoked....Whoever did that needs to be fired. It was terrible, a terrible decision. Awful. I might get fined for saying that, but so what?

Shaquille O'Neal

I've had a righteous streak since as long as I can remember. I never tolerated bullying from kids or authority, no matter the case. I got into trouble for calling things how I saw it in my early years at Catholic school, but I couldn't help myself.

Tara Stiles

At one time, when I was eight years old, my mother and father, my brother and my sisters - we had to move back in with my grandmother, and there were 13 of us living in one house.

Jesmyn Ward

I was 9 years old when my father - a strong, vibrant man in his early 40s - died of a heart attack. He was such a central figure in our lives that losing him was a terrible shock to all of us, my mother in particular.

Marillyn Hewson

Rome remained free for four hundred years and Sparta eight hundred, although their citizens were armed all that time; but many other states that have been disarmed have lost their liberties in less than forty years.

Niccolo Machiavelli

They've been screaming about the death of literacy for years, but I think TV is the Gutenberg [printing] press. I think TV is the only thing that keeps us vaguely in democracy even if it's in the hands of the corporate culture. If you're an artist you write in your time. Moaning about the fact that maybe people read more books a hundred years ago - that's not true. I think the same percentage has always read.

Sherman Alexie

My mother - both my mother and father had very successful careers. My mother's an English professor and my father is a scientist and physician. They worked at the same jobs for their entire life, 50 years each.

David Plotz

When I was in high school in the early 1970s, we knew we were running out of oil; we knew that easy sources were being capped; we knew that diversifying would be much better; we knew that there were terrible dictators and horrible governments that we were enriching who hated us. We knew all that and we did really nothing.

Carl Safina

You think it's hard for me when I go in the ring and fight? That's the least of my problems. I think about the five years that I did in prison. I think about the nine years on parole. Nothing - nothing! - can compare to that struggle. I'm telling you, from being an ex-convict with 30 convictions, a degree nowhere to be found and black? I'm done.

Bernard Hopkins

Infuriatingly stupid analysts - especially people who called themselves Arabists, yet who seemed to know next to nothing about the reality of the Islamic world - wrote reams of commentary [after 9/11]. Their articles were all about Islam saving Aristotle and the zero, which medieval Muslim scholars had done more than eight hundred years ago; about Islam being a religion of peace and tolerance, not the slightest bit violent. These were fairy tales, nothing to do with the real world I knew.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I've played heavies for years and years and years. I was bald. I came to Hollywood. I did a play about junk. I was a pusher, so I played pushers for years and years and years. I did war movies and things like that.

Gavin MacLeod

My father was an Episcopal minister, and for 14 years my family lived in China, in a city called Wuchang. We four children spoke Chinese before we spoke English. We left when the communists came, in the early 1930s. I was about 5 years old.

Audrey Meadows

Downwinders, meaning those people, individuals, communities that were downwind of the nuclear test site. During those years when we were testing atomic bombs above ground, when we watched them for entertainment from the roofs of our high schools, little did we know what was raining down on us, little did we know what would appear years later.

Terry Tempest Williams

A Quote by Frank McCourt

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