Quotes from bell hooks

Writing is my passion. Words are the way to know ecstasy. Without them life is barren.

The willingness to sacrifice is a necessary dimension of loving practice and living in community. None of us can have things our way all the time. Giving up something is one way we sustain a commitment to the collective well-being. Our willingness to make sacrifices reflects our awareness of interdependency.

If you do not love yourself, you will be unable to love anyone else

True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption.

The earth, like all of nature, could be life giving but it could also threaten and take life, hence the need for respect for the power of one's natural habitat.

Clearly, men need new models for self-assertion that do not require the construction of an enemy "other

The only canons I formed in my mind were filled with the writers with whom I felt a soul inspiring resonance, the writers whose works were great to me because they gave me words, wisdom, and visions powerful enough to transform me and my world.

Many of us learn as children that friendship should never be seen as just as important as family ties. However, friendship is the place in which a great majority of us have our first glimpse of redemptive love and caring community. Learning to love in friendships empowers us in ways that enable us to bring this love to other interactions with family or with romantic bonds.

It is far too easy to stay stuck in simply describing, telling one's story over and over again, which can be a way of holding on to grief about the past or holding on to a narrative that places blame on others.

Now my feeling is that our hope lies in reality because the culture of empire--the capitalist, hedonistic patriarchal culture is driven by fantasy--an addiction to fantasy. To the extent that we can encourage and promote facing reality, we have concrete reasons to hope.

Commitment to a love ethic transforms our lives by offering us a different set of values to live by. In large and small ways, we make choices based on a belief that honesty, openness, and personal integrity need to be expressed in public and private decisions.

What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.

In everyday life males and females alike are relatively silent about love. Our silence shields us from uncertainty. We want to know love. We are simply afraid the desire to know too much about love will lead us closer and closer to the abyss of lovelessness.

I dreamed about a culture of belonging. I still dream that dream. I contemplate what our lives would be like if we knew how to cultivate awareness, to live mindfully, peacefully; if we learned habits of being that would bring us closer together, that would help us build beloved community.

It is far easier to talk about loss than it is to talk about love. It is easier to articulate the pain of love's absence than to describe its presence and meaning in our lives.

individuals feeling connected to someone through the process of cathecting insist that they love the other person even if they are hurting or neglecting them. Since their feeling is that of cathexis, they insist that what they feel is love.

The message given males is that to be honest is to be "soft." The ability to be dishonest and indifferent to the consequences makes a male hard, separates the men from the boys.

Significantly, in future feminist movement we will spend less time critiquing patriarchal marriage bonds and expend more effort showing alternatives, showing the value of peer relationships which are founded on principles of equality, respect, and the belief that mutual satisfaction and growth are needed for partnerships to be fulfilling and lasting.

Most American women, particularly white women, have not decolonized their thinking either in relation to the racism, sexism, and class elitism they hold towards less powerful groups of women in this society or the masses of women globally.

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.

To live fully we would need to let go of our fear of dying.

Feminist movement is pro-family.

Black liberation struggle must be re-visioned so that it is no longer equated with maleness. We need a revolutionary vision of black liberation, one that emerges from a feminist standpoint and addresses the collective plight of black people.

What we as women need to ask ourselves is: In what context within patriarchy do women create space where we can protect our genius? It's a very, very difficult question.