Frank McCourt Quotes on Christianity (6 Quotes)

Another student, Ken, the son of Korean immigrants, enrages his ambitious father when he decides to go to Stanford, instead of Harvard or M.I.T. as his father had hoped. He appeared at my classroom door a few days before Christmas and told me I had helped him get through the last year of high school, ... At one time he had a dream of going into a dark alleyway with his father and only one of them would come out. He'd be the one, of course, but out there in Stanford, he began to think about his father and what it was like coming from Korea, working day and night selling fruit and vegetables when he knew barely enough English to get through the day, hanging on, desperate for his children to get the education he never had in Korea, that you couldn't even dream of in Korea.

I had to get rid of any idea of hell or any idea of the afterlife. That's what held me, kept me down. So now I just have nothing but contempt for the institution of the church.

We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely.

There were positive things about the church, that is, in the European cultural sense, the architecture, the liturgy, the music, the art, such as it was, the stations of the cross in the church, the tradition, and the atmosphere of awe and mystery in the mass. The atmosphere of miracle, one of mainly mystery, that's what fascinates me.

The poverty and the influence of the church were very damaging. It damaged all of us emotionally. To be poor deprives you of self-esteem.

I admire certain priests and nuns who go off on their own and do God's work on their own, who help in the ghettos, but as far as the institution of the church is concerned, I think it is despicable.