An Education Monologues

A coming-of-age story about a teenage girl in 1960s suburban London, and how her life changes with the arrival of a playboy nearly twice her age.

If you never do anything, you never become anyone.

The life I want, there is no shortcut.

Studying is hard and boring. Teaching is hard and boring. So, what you're telling me is to be bored, and then bored, and finally bored again, but this time for the rest of my life? This whole stupid country is bored! There's no life in it, or color, or fun! It's probably just as well the Russians are going to drop a nuclear bomb on us any day now. So my choice is to do something hard and boring, or to marry my… Jew, and go to Paris and Rome and listen to jazz, and read, and eat good food in nice restaurants, and have fun! It's not enough to educate us anymore Ms. Walters. You've got to tell us why you're doing it.

It's funny though, isn't it? All that poetry and all those songs, about something that lasts no time at all.

One of the boys I dated, and they were boys, suggested that we go to Paris and I said I'd always wanted to see Paris. As if I'd never been!

I don't want to lose my virginity to a piece of fruit.

You're my father again now, are you? And what were you when you encouraged me to throw my life away? Silly schoolgirls are always getting seduced by glamorous older men, but what about you two?

If people die the moment that they graduate, then surely it's the things we do beforehand that count.