Frank McCourt Quotes

Hawaii is the best form of comfort for me. When I die, I want to be cremated, and I want half my ashes spread in the Pacific around the island, the rest on the property.

Don't bury me with anyone old.

… one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.

May you live to see the green grass growing over your grave.

If I'm taking a picture of Brancusi's grave, I know that there's something of him, of his mortal remains, beneath my feet, and there's something beautiful about that.

It's really sort of morbid, but she said her mother wanted to see me all her life. And when she died, she made just one request: that a picture of me be put into her casket. So somewhere in England, I'm in a casket.

I wanted to publish a book simply to be buried with it; that's all I wanted. I had no ambition beyond that.

I've been short all my life. And if anyone wonders what my dying wish will be, they can stop wondering. That will be easy. I'll just tell them, 'I'll have a short bier.'

Pillow my head on no guesses when I die.

When I die bury me in smoke.

Why do people want to pretend that death is sleep? It isn't. It isn't.

Death is the quiet haven of us all.

I often thought my gravestone would say, 'Here lies Gandalf. He came out,'

The grave is still the best shelter against the storms of destiny.

I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave--thank God for the quiet grave--O! I can feel the cold earth upon me--the daisies growing over me--O for this quiet--it will be my first.

Sleep in a world, your final sleep has woken

God himself took a day to rest in, and a good man's grave is his Sabbath.

What a nasty act of cruelty, giving a dying man his last wish. Don't you realize he doesn't want it? His real wish is not to die.

I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave - thank God for the quiet grave

If I could have two things in one: the peace of the grave, and the light of the sun.

[On an epitaph for herself:] Under here, we're all equal.

But one wants the idea of Death, you know, as something large and unknowable, something that allows a person to stretch himself out. Especially one wants it if one is tired. Or perhaps what one wants is simply a release from sensation, from all consciousness for ever.

Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?