Quotes from bell hooks

Women, more so than men, rush out to purchase this literature. We do so because collectively we are concerned about lovelessness.

Maybe this is why men have one 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.

Since individuals committed to advancing patriarchy are producing most of the images we see, they have an investment in providing us with representations that reflect their values and the social institutions they want to uphold. [...] Yet they need a consumer audience to whom they can sell their product. Therein lies our power to demand change.

When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect with them; that is, we invest feelings or emotion in them. That process of investment wherein a loved one becomes important to us is called cathexis. In his book Peck rightly emphasizes that most of us confuse cathecting with loving.

Estrangement from feelings makes it easier for men to lie because they are often in a trance state, utilizing survival strategies of asserting manhood that they learned as boys. This inability to connect with others carries with it an inability to assume responsibility for causing pain.

This faulty thinking often shapes our adult perceptions of love. So that just as we would cling to the notion that those who hurt us as children loved us, we try to rationalize being hurt by other adults by insisting that they love us.

And when we work with love we create a loving working environment.

When we work with love we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self-love, it nurtures our growth. It's not what you do but how you do it.

Lerner points out that we do not usually know the emotional costs of keeping a secret until the truth is disclosed.

is particularly distressing that so many recent books on love continue to insist that definitions of love are unnecessary and meaningless. Or worse, the authors suggest love should mean something different to men than it does to women—that the sexes should respect and adapt to our inability to communicate since we do not share the same language. This type of literature is popular because it does not demand a change in fixed ways of thinking about gender roles, culture, or love.

When we begin to experience the sacred in our everyday lives we bring to mundane tasks a quality of concentration and engagement that lifts the spirit.

When we speak radically of the dark divine, the invitation is for each and every one of us to transcend race and gender, to move beyond categories into the interior spaces of our psyches and encounter there the ground of our being, the place of mystery, creativity, and possibility, for it is there that we can construct the mind that can resist, that can revision, that can create the maps that when followed will liberate us.

Men theorize about love, but women are more often love's practitioners.

it [living purposefully] entails taking responsibility for consciously creating goals, identifying the actions necessary to achieve the, making sure our behavior is in alignment with our goals, and paying attention to the outcome of our actions so that we see whether they are leading us where we want to go.

Estrangement from our natural environment is the cultural contest wherein violence against the earth is accepted and normalized. If we do not see earth as a guide to divine spirit, then we cannot see that the human spirit is violated, diminshed when humans violate and destroy the natural environment.

The presence of angels, of angelic spirits, reminds us that there is a realm of mystery that cannot be explained by human intellect or will

When I was approaching the age of forty and facing the type of cancer scares that have become so commonplace in women's lives they are practically routine, my first thought as I waited for test results was that I was not ready to die because I had not yet found the love my heart had been seeking.

Women who would no more tolerate a friendship in which they were emotionally and physically abused stay in romantic relationships where these violations occur regularly. Had they brought to these bonds the same standards they bring to friendship they would not accept victimization.

We must seet a value in life that is above and beyond profit motives.

Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else's image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself.

In the Mars-and-Venus gendered universe, men want power and women want emotional attachment and connection. On this planet nobody really has the opportunity to know love since it is power and not love that is the order of the day.

One cannot love, an image, a dead likeness, it will never give back, the real you, or let you see, the inside heart. When Angels Speak of LOVE-Poem 25

For the most part, white women refused to listen when black women explained that what they expected was not verbal admissions of guilt but conscious gestures and acts that would show that white women liberationists were anti-racist and attempting to overcome their racism.

The mass media dwells on and perpetuates an ethic of domination and violence because our image makers have more intimate knowledge of these realities than they have with the realities of love.