I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.

Eartha Kitt frames learning as a lifelong, self-directed process rather than something completed with formal schooling or credentials. By calling her tombstone a “diploma,” she suggests that only at the end of life can one’s education—understood as accumulated experience, growth, and hard-won insight—be considered finished. The line also carries a wry critique of status markers: certificates can certify training, but they cannot capture the ongoing work of becoming a fuller person. Coming from a performer who continually reinvented herself across music, stage, film, and activism, the remark underscores resilience, curiosity, and the refusal to be “done” developing.