Frank McCourt Quotes

Granana doesn't understand what the big deal is. She didn't cry at Olivia's funeral, and I doubt she even remembers Olivia's name. Granana lost, like, ninety-two million kids in childbirth. All of her brothers died in the war. She survived the Depression by stealing radish bulbs from her neighbors' garden, and fishing the elms for pigeons. Dad likes to remind us of this in a grave voice, as if it explained her jaundiced pitilessness: "Boys. Your grandmother ate pigeons."

In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.

I lost my parents very early in my life. My mom died three weeks after I graduated from high school, and my dad died two years after I got married.

At the bottom, all wars are the same because they involve death and maiming and wounding, and grieving mothers, fathers, sons and daughters.

I lost my brother in a car wreck when I was 14 years old. When I decided I wanted to be a country singer, my dad always told me, 'Son, you should write a song about your brother.'

War kills men, and men deplore the loss; but war also crushes bad principles and tyrants, and so saves societies.

My father was killed by a German mine, while I lost other relatives in Allied bombing attacks.

'Hard Hit,' a YA collection of poems, explores the country of grief and survival. Mark, a 16-year-old boy and skilled pitcher, must confront the coming death of his beloved father with the help of his friends, family, baseball, and an idiosyncratic belief in God. I used my own experience of my parents' deaths to inform this journey.

I have been through two wars in my 24 years, and I know what it's like to be without anything, to see the bombs flying above your head.

When people are hungry, when a mother or father is facing a child that they can't feed, you can't ask that family to lay down their arms.

War taught me that not everything is glamorous.

You rarely hear women crying in Grozney. They have cried their eyes out long ago.

More than two million German soldiers went to their death for the fatherland before me. I follow now my sons - all for Germany.

I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes. I see it as a large thing too, only I break it into small units of one man at a time, and see it as a large and monstrous thing for each man involved. I see the war as death in one form or another for men dressed as soldiers, and all the men who survived the war, including myself, I see as men who died with their brothers, dressed as soldiers

And when the war is done and youth stone dead I'd toddle safely home and die—in bed.

My sons are ready to die. Your sons still want to live.

My mom had a heart attack, and it came out of nowhere - she was 54. My dad had leukemia for about 3 months. He was 80 when he passed. My dad had me later in life, and so he had leukemia and was alive for about 3 months between diagnosis and passing away.

There's nothing good that comes out of war. It's simply hell on earth, and people survive, and people don't.

In war, everything changes. You are very selective of what you do because everything you do can be the last thing you do in your life.

I have lost my mother, my father, my five, and ninety relatives in Poland. Poland is for me a cemetery.

No soldier ever really survives a war.

I always thought I'd be the one to go first. ... The world might be mourning an Everly Brother, but I'm mourning my brother Phil Everly. My wife Adela and I are touched by all the tributes we're seeing for Phil and we thank you for allowing us to grieve in private at this incredibly difficult time.

Cursing themselves in ragged dreamsfire has singed the edges of,they know a slow dying the fields have come to terms with.Shimmering fans work against the heat& smell of gunpowder, making moneyfloat from hand to hand. The next momenta rocket pushes a white fistthrough night sky, & they scatter like birds& fall into the shape their liveshave become.

In war it does not matter who is right, but who is left.

I lay in my bed night after night staring at the ceiling and thinking, Why have I survived the war? Why was I the last person in my immediate family to be alive? I didn’t know.