Education Quote by Katherine Anne Porter

Love, in Porter’s framing, isn’t a lightning strike; it’s a discipline with a short memory. The line has the plainspoken authority of someone who watched big emotions collide with real life and lose. As a journalist-novelist who chronicled war, illness, family fracture, and the quiet humiliations of pride, Porter treats love less like destiny than like a practice you return to after you’ve botched it, after grief, after resentment calcifies.

The sentence works because it refuses the romance myth without turning cynical. “Must” carries a moral pressure: love isn’t optional decoration, it’s work you owe to other people and, uncomfortably, to yourself. “Learned again” is the knife twist. It admits relapse. It implies that the self isn’t a stable instrument; you change, others change, the world changes, and whatever lesson you thought you mastered gets invalidated by the next season of loss or intimacy. That repetition also gestures toward forgiveness: not a single heroic act, but a recurring recalibration.

“There is no end to it” lands as both consolation and warning. Consolation, because failure doesn’t disqualify you; the curriculum is infinite. Warning, because there’s no graduation, no permanent proof of virtue. In the 20th century’s churn of broken social contracts and modern disillusionment, Porter’s line is a rebuke to sentimental certainty: if love is real, it will keep demanding revision, attention, and humility.