Love & Passion Quote by Frank McCourt

McCourt’s genius here is how he turns “of course” into a knife. That phrase pretends the condemnation of dancing is simply the natural order of things, then immediately exposes how absurd that “common sense” is. He’s not arguing with doctrine on its own terms; he’s spotlighting the comic panic underneath it: the terror that bodies might behave like bodies.

The line runs on in a breathless, almost conversational rush - “you might… you might… you might…” - mimicking the slippery-slope logic of moral policing. One hand brush and suddenly civilization collapses. McCourt’s bite lands hardest on “something natural,” a phrase that sounds gentle but detonates the whole premise. If the feared outcome is nature itself, then the institution doing the condemning is revealed as not merely strict but fundamentally anti-human.

Context matters: McCourt is steeped in the Irish Catholic culture he wrote about so vividly, where respectability was often enforced through surveillance of sexuality, especially among the young and the poor. Dancing becomes a proxy battlefield: not just about rhythm or music, but about controlling contact, pleasure, and the possibility of choice. His humor isn’t decorative; it’s a survival tactic and a moral critique. By framing repression as faintly ridiculous, he drains it of its authority and returns the reader to a simpler truth: wanting, touching, getting “excited” are not scandals. They’re the cost of being alive.