You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.
Stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it.
I know that big people don’t like questions from children. They can ask all the questions they like, How’s school? Are you a good boy? Did you say your prayers? but if you ask them did they say their prayers you might be hit on the head.
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.
They can afford to smile because they all have teeth so dazzling if they dropped them in the snow they’d be lost forever.
The master says it’s a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it’s a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there’s anyone in the world who would like us to live.
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.
You can’t teach in a vacuum. A good teacher relates the material to real life. You understand that, don’t you?
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.
When I act tough they listen politely till the spasm passes. They know.
There’s nothing sillier in the world than a teacher telling you don’t do it after you already did it.
They said her duck recipe and the Chinese music were so dramatic everything else sounded anemic.
Rest your eyes and then read till they fall out of your head.
Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.
Just let them sit in the goddam sun. But the world won’t let them because there’s nothing more dangerous than letting old farts sit in the sun. They might be thinking. Same thing with kids. Keep ’em busy or they might start thinking.
Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it.
I think there’s something about the Irish experience – that we had to have a sense of humor or die.
That’s what kept us going – a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.
For some reason, I had a responsibility to my family and the people who lived around me. I felt that I had to convey their dignity – the way they dealt with adversity and poverty – and their good humor.
Kids all want to look cool, as if knowledge is a great burden, but they’re always looking around. They remember.
Actually, my mother and Alfie came for three weeks’ Christmas vacation and stayed for 21 years. I guess my mother never went back because she was lonely.
We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely.
When I was a teacher, I’d walk into the classroom. I stood at the board. I was the man. I directed operations. I was an intellectual and artistic and moral traffic cop, and I – and I would direct the class, most of the time.
The main thing I am interested in is my experience as a teacher.
We don’t look at teachers as scholars the way they do in Europe. In Spain you’re called a professor if you’re a high school teacher, and they pay teachers – they pay teachers in Europe.
When I got out of the army, I had the G.I. Bill. Since I had no high school education or anything like that, I came to NYU, and they took a chance on me and let me in.
The sky is the limit. You never have the same experience twice.
Mam was always saying we had a simple diet: tea and bread, bread and tea, a liquid and a solid, a balanced diet – what more do you need? Nobody got fat.