An Education Quotes

“I learned not to trust people; I learned not to believe what they say but to watch what they do; I learned to suspect that anyone and everyone is capable of 'living a lie'. I came to believe that other people - even when you think you know them well - are ultimately unknowable.”
― Lynn Barber, An Education: My Life Might Have Turned Out Differently if I Had Just Said No

“But perhaps this is what goes wrong with long marriages--you state your opinions, your likes and dislikes, at the beginning and then forget to mention when they change" (135).”
― Lynn Barber, An Education: My Life Might Have Turned Out Differently if I Had Just Said No

“...Everything I had learned or assimilated from my parents I now regarded as unreliable, and needing to be rethought from scratch. In fact, I probably went further-I felt that everything my parents believed was by definition wrong, and that if I ever felt myself in agreement with my parents I should immediately recant. Everything... needed to be jettisoned. But in a way what they said wasn't the problem: what I was more worried about was the attitudes, prejudices, beliefs I might have picked up from them subconsciously or before I was old enough to even know what I was learning. Effectively, I had to question everything I believed, and never accept my own instincts. It required constant vigilance; it was intellectually exhausting.”
― Lynn Barber, An Education: My Life Might Have Turned Out Differently if I Had Just Said No

“What did I get from Simon? An education - the thing my parents always wanted me to have.”
― Lynn Barber, An Education: My Life Might Have Turned Out Differently if I Had Just Said No

“People say you shouldn't marry for looks but I disagree: if I tot up all the pleasure I got from looking at David over the years I'd say it amounted to a very substantial hill of beans.”
― Lynn Barber, An Education: My Life Might Have Turned Out Differently if I Had Just Said No

“I think people who try to run their marriages according to other people's expectations are insane. It is quite hard enough to keep a marriage together till death do you part- which I think should be the aim, even if it can't always succeed- without trying to do it to please other people. A good marriage is whatever suits the participants, and our marriage suited us fine.”
― Lynn Barber, An Education: My Life Might Have Turned Out Differently if I Had Just Said No

“I suspect this is always the way with conmen: they don’t even have to construct a whole story, their victims fill in the gaps, reconcile the irreconciliables – their victims do most of the work.”
― Lynn Barber, An Education: My Life Might Have Turned Out Differently if I Had Just Said No

“I was just not cut out to be an American journalist. In England, I could phone my editor and say 'Do you want an interview with X?' and get an immediate yes or no. At Vanity Fair I had to 'pitch ideas' and then go through layers of editors, all of whom asked what my 'angle' was going to be. I have always deeply hated and resented this question. If you have an angle on someone, it means you have already decided what to write before you meet, so you really might as well not bother interviewing them" (126).”
― Lynn Barber, An Education: My Life Might Have Turned Out Differently if I Had Just Said No

“If I could communicate only by words on a page, how much more satisfactory I would be!”
― Lynn Barber, An Education: My Life Might Have Turned Out Differently if I Had Just Said No

“...I’m never exactly a slave to facts at the best of times. But does it matter? Who owns memories after all?”
― Lynn Barber, An Education: My Life Might Have Turned Out Differently if I Had Just Said No

“I am a deep believer in the unknowability of other people”
― Lynn Barber, An Education

“I still have a somewhat exaggerated hatred of anything to do with the past”
― Lynn Barber, An Education: My Life Might Have Turned Out Differently if I Had Just Said No

“I learned to suspect that anyone and everyone is capable of ‘living a lie’. I came to believe that other people – even when you think you know them well – are ultimately unknowable. Learning all this was a good basis for my subsequent career as an interviewer, but not, I think, for life. It made me too wary, too cautious, too ungiving. I was damaged by my education.”
― Lynn Barber, An Education: My Life Might Have Turned Out Differently if I Had Just Said No

“panegyrics”
― Lynn Barber, An Education