Quotes from bell hooks

In a world without love the passion to connect can be replaced by the passion to possess.

I was a young girl buying bubble gum at the corner store when I first really heard the full name bell hooks. I had just 'talked back' to a grown person. Even now I can recall the surprised look, the mocking tones that informed me I must be kin to bell hooks - a sharp-tongued woman, a woman who spoke her mind, a woman who was not afraid to talk back. I claimed this legacy of defiance, of will, of courage, affirming my link to my female ancestors who were bold and daring in their speech.

The desire to love is not itself love. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will - namely, both an intention and action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love. - Fromm

Until black people, and our allies in love and struggle, become militant about how we are represented on television, in movies, and in books, we will not see imaginative work that offers images of black characters who love. If love is not present in our imaginations, it will not be there in our lives.

Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Its aim is not to benefit solely any specific group of women, any particular race or class of women. It does not privilege women over men. It has the power to transform in a meaningful way all our lives. Most importantly, feminism is neither a lifestyle nor a ready-made identity or role one can step into.

When we hear another person's thoughts, beliefs, and feelings, it is more difficult to project on to them our perceptions of who they are.

Peck defines community as the coming together of a group of individuals, 'who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationship go deeper than the masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to rejoice together, mourn together, and to delight in each other, and make other's conditions our own.

We knew that there could no real sisterhood between white women and women of color if white women were not able to divest of white supremacy, if feminist movement were not fundamentally anti-racist.

WHEN I WAS a child, it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love. I wish I could testify that I came to this awareness because of the love I felt in my life. But it was love's absence that let me know how much love mattered. I was my father's first daughter.

Significantly, I am among those rare feminist theorists who believe that it is crucial for feminist movement to have as an overriding agenda ending all forms of violence.

False notions of love teach us that it is the place where we will feel no pain, where we will be in a state of constant bliss. We have to expose the falseness of these beliefs to see and accept the reality that suffering and pain do not end when we begin to love. In some cases when we are making the slow journey back from lovelessness to love, our suffering may become more intense. Acceptance of pain is part of loving practice.

In popular culture love is always the stuff of fantasy. Maybe this is why men have done most of the theorizing about love. Fantasy has primarily been their domain, both in the sphere of cultural production and in everyday life. Male fantasy is seen as something that can create reality, whereas female fantasy is regarded as pure escape.

Self-love cannot flourish in isolation. It is no easy task to be self-loving.

Since women remain the primary caretakers of children, the facts confirm the reality that given a hierarchal system in a culture of domination which empowers females (like the parent-child relationship) all too often they use coercive force to maintain dominance. In a culture of domination everyone is socialized to see violence as an acceptable means of social control.

Greed is rightly considered a deadly sin because it erodes the moral values that encourage us to care for the common good. Greed violates the spirit of connectedness and community that is natural to human survival [...] replacing this awareness with harmful self-centeredness.

When anyone thinks a woman who serves gives 'cause that's what mothers or real women do, they deny her full humanity and thus fail to see the generosity inherent in her acts.

Shame makes self-acceptance and self-love impossible.

I was taught that it was important to speak but to talk a talk that was in itself a silence.

When anyone thinks a woman who serves 'gives 'cause that's what mothers or real women do,' they deny her full humanity and thus fail to see the generosity inherent in her acts.

Speaking becomes both a way to engage in active self-transformation and a rite of passage where one moves from being object to being subject. Only as subjects can we speak. As objects, we remain voiceless—our beings defined and interpreted by others.

When we are loving we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust.

La sororidad nunca habría sido posible a través de las fronteras de raza y clase si las mujeres individualmente no hubieran estado dispuestas a desprenderse de su poder para dominar y explotar a grupos subordinados de mujeres.

Enjoying the benefits of living and loving in community empowers us to meet strangers without fear and extend to them the gift of openness and recognition. Just by speaking to a stranger, acknowledging their presence on the planet, we make a connection.

here in this untouched wood a dirge a lamentation for earth to live again earth that is all at once a grave a resting place a bed of new beginning