Lorraine Toussaint Quotes

I had an Edinburgh, middle-class childhood and a public school education.

I'm just a public-schoolboy. I've got a degree. I'm from a middle-class family in Devon. I've got no story.

You mustn't forget the circumstances I have been brought up in, the little education I have had.

I was born and raised in Essex, just outside London, to a financially comfortable, well-educated Pakistani family.

My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women's education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford, and her own mother was a doctor.

I was fortunate to grow up in a middle-class home with two hardworking parents who enjoyed both reading and mathematics.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

The taste of the times is, unhappily, to give to children something of book-learning, with a view of placing them to live, in some way or other, upon the labour of other people.

I'm from a family of educators. I grew up with books in my house and in my hands and my parents in my life.

When I grew up, I realised what an amazing thing my parents did. It was such a big deal for my mom, a middle class woman, to decide to leave her children and husband to go and do her Ph.D. for three years. And my dad, who is even more middle class, a traditional South Indian, to let his wife do that.

I grew up in a middle-class family. I went to law school.

Growing up in Middlesbrough I was taught to be resilient and competitive. My teachers made us believe that just because kids were at private school up the road, it didn't mean they were better than us.

I hope to focus on what I'm passionate about because I think I'd do them best job on them - education, urban education, women and children's issues and literacy.

My father, Emil Palade, was professor of philosophy, and my mother, Constanta Cantemir-Palade, was a teacher. The family environment explains why I acquired early in life great respect for books, scholars and education.

Access to books and the encouragement of the habit of reading: these two things are the first and most necessary steps in education and librarians, teachers and parents all over the country know it. It is our children's right and it is also our best hope and their best hope for the future.

I was born in 1943 and raised in the Bronx, in a high rise apartment complex known as Parkchester, the only child of Max, an accountant who worked in the garment district in Manhattan, and Rose, an elementary school teacher.

When I was growing up, I was lucky to benefit from a first class education.

I'm always represented as a bit of a class warrior - a bit Down With Men and Down With Middle-Class People. Whereas I'm actually very fond of men and am middle-class. I even went to boarding school in Perthshire.

The best students come from homes where education is revered: where there are books, and children see their parents reading them.

You must get an education. You must go to school, and you must learn to protect yourself. And you must learn to protect yourself with the pen, and not the gun.

America is becoming so educated that ignorance will be a novelty. I will belong to the select few.

The readership of Victorian novels, when they were published, was much less diverse. People were probably white, and had enough money to be literate. Very often, there are phrases in Italian, German and French that are left untranslated.

As the daughter of a schoolteacher, I feel very strongly that the most important thing in school takes place right there in that classroom, and the interaction between the teacher and the child.

My mother was a first-grade teacher, so I credit her with this lifelong intellectual curiosity I have, and love of reading and learning.

I was always an avid reader of books. My vocabulary, my English are all thanks to that reading habit. Reading keeps me grounded. I came from a very middle class family - poor, in fact.