Love Quote by Sara Teasdale

Wisdom, Teasdale suggests, is not an upgrade you earn by aging gracefully; it is the scar tissue left behind by repetition. The line turns a familiar platitude ("time makes you wise") inside out. Years, in her telling, don’t educate on their own. They merely provide the calendar space in which heartbreak can do its brutal tutoring. That’s why "strange" lands so sharply: it registers both disbelief and resignation, as if the speaker can’t quite accept the syllabus but has already paid the tuition.

The craft is in the sentence’s quiet arithmetic. "How often" implies an almost statistical cruelty, a tally of losses that feels unromantic precisely because it’s honest. The "heart" is singular, not plural; the same self must be cracked again and again, which hints at pattern, not accident. Subtextually, this isn’t only about lovers. It’s about the way people repeat attachments, hopes, and self-deceptions until consequence finally outruns denial.

Teasdale wrote in a period when women’s emotional lives were both romanticized and policed, and her work often threads lyric tenderness through hard constraint. Read against that backdrop, the quote carries a muted critique: society sells love as destiny while offering little protection from its costs, then calls the aftermath "maturity". The line’s power is its refusal to glamorize pain while still conceding its utility. Wisdom arrives late, not as consolation, but as proof of what it took to get there.