Quotes From Angela's Ashes
Chapter I
QUOTE; It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
As Angela’s Ashes opens, Frank describes how his parents meet and marry in New York, then eventually move back to Ireland with their four sons. He characterizes his upbringing as a typical “miserable Irish Catholic childhood,” complete with a drunken father and a downtrodden, browbeaten mother. He tells of Limerick’s interminable rain, which spreads disease throughout the town.
Frank then backtracks and tells the story of his mother and father’s lives before the birth of their children. Malachy McCourt, …show more content…
Malachy finds out that his dole is only nineteen shillings a week; to supplement that money, Angela goes to the St. Vincent de Paul Society for charity. Although the other women waiting for money are initially suspicious of Angela, with her American coat and Yankee children, they warm to her after she tells them of the loss of her baby. Angela receives a docket for groceries and befriends a kind, funny woman named Nora Molloy. Nora accompanies Frank’s mother to the grocery store to make sure the saleswoman does not cheat Angela. The two women sit outside smoking cigarettes while Nora tells Angela about her husband, “Peter Molloy, champion pint drinker.”
Soon Frank’s one-year-old brother Oliver becomes ill, and his parents take him to the hospital. Grandma takes Frank and his brothers, Malachy and Eugene, to their Aunt Aggie’s, where the boys eat porridge. Uncle Pa holds Malachy on his knee, a sight that makes Aggie cry, because she has no children of her own. The children return home to find that Oliver has died. At his brother’s burial, Frank throws stones at the jackdaws that perch on trees all around the burial site. The next day, Frank’s father spends all of his dole money on
QUOTE; It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
As Angela’s Ashes opens, Frank describes how his parents meet and marry in New York, then eventually move back to Ireland with their four sons. He characterizes his upbringing as a typical “miserable Irish Catholic childhood,” complete with a drunken father and a downtrodden, browbeaten mother. He tells of Limerick’s interminable rain, which spreads disease throughout the town.
Frank then backtracks and tells the story of his mother and father’s lives before the birth of their children. Malachy McCourt, …show more content…
Malachy finds out that his dole is only nineteen shillings a week; to supplement that money, Angela goes to the St. Vincent de Paul Society for charity. Although the other women waiting for money are initially suspicious of Angela, with her American coat and Yankee children, they warm to her after she tells them of the loss of her baby. Angela receives a docket for groceries and befriends a kind, funny woman named Nora Molloy. Nora accompanies Frank’s mother to the grocery store to make sure the saleswoman does not cheat Angela. The two women sit outside smoking cigarettes while Nora tells Angela about her husband, “Peter Molloy, champion pint drinker.”
Soon Frank’s one-year-old brother Oliver becomes ill, and his parents take him to the hospital. Grandma takes Frank and his brothers, Malachy and Eugene, to their Aunt Aggie’s, where the boys eat porridge. Uncle Pa holds Malachy on his knee, a sight that makes Aggie cry, because she has no children of her own. The children return home to find that Oliver has died. At his brother’s burial, Frank throws stones at the jackdaws that perch on trees all around the burial site. The next day, Frank’s father spends all of his dole money on